Photograph album of Albert Sutton, (Leading Aircraftsman, Royal Air Force, WWII)
The National Museum of Ireland’s military collection was recently bequeathed the Irish military ephemera collection of Mr Albert Sutton.As well as being a collector, Albert was also a WWII veteran who served in the Royal Air Force during WWII. He left his home in Clontarf in 1939 and travelled to Belfast to enlist in the British Forces for the war effort, without his parents’ knowledge or consent.
The album is a photo essay of his journey through Europe from January to December 1945, through Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark, as the Allied Forces pushed the German Army back from the Western Front. It is a fascinating mix of tourist souvenir photographs of cities such as Brussels, Bruges, Eindhoven and Copenhagen, Albert and his comrades maintaining airplanes, pictures of friends he made in various cities - including meeting his Danish wife - mixed with the horrors of war interspersed throughout; battle scenes, German prisoners of war burying their dead in mass graves, and a Belgian collaborator being punished.
Albert was also one of the first people to enter Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp to liberate its 60,000 survivors in April 1945, and spent his later years in Ireland speaking to schools to educate them about the Holocaust.
The page shown here is particularly interesting - the capture of German prisoners of war, which Albert sarcastically labels ‘The Master Race’ in reference to the Nazi Party’s ideology.
While Ireland was officially neutral in WWII (known in Ireland as ‘The Emergency’), tens of thousands Irishmen and women served with the Allied Forces’ (mainly British, American and French) armies. You can learn more about Irish service in WWII and The Emergency in the Soldiers and Chiefs exhibition in Collins Barracks.
