http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/aug/29/tv-review-who-do-you-think-you-are

Alfred Stewart enlisted in the army at 19 – an attempt, it seems, to escape from the responsibility of fathering an illegitimate child (Patrick's older brother Jeffrey) with Gladys Barrowclough (whom he would eventually marry and with whom he would have more children, including Patrick). And it was army, rather than domestic life, that suited him and where he best succeeded. He saw action in France in the second world war, arriving in Abbeville, Picardy, in May 1940 where he saw, as the diary of one of his fellow soldiers records, "modern warfare at its foulest". The refugees and their treatment by the German forces, who considered the columns of desperate men, women and children legitimate targets and their deaths a useful way of making roads impassable for the allies, haunted him for the rest of his life. A local newspaper reporting on his return home described him as suffering from shell shock.

In 1943 he volunteered for the recently formed Parachute Regiment and moved swiftly up the army ranks, taking part in Operation Dragoon – the second and astonishingly successful phase, after the Normandy landings, of D-Day – and was handpicked to become the acting regimental sergeant major to the second battalion after it lost three-quarters of its men at Arnhem and needed someone capable of both caring for and inspiring those who were left.