[MRM]

Roger Water's father was killed at Anzio in WWII when he was an infant or toddler. He never knew his father and his mother was scarred by the loss and found it hard to deal with Waters. The scene in the movie where the Pink character as a kid is going through his mom's dresser drawers and finds a box full of medals happened the same way in real life. The mom caught Waters looking through the medals, that he had never heard of or suspected because the father's memory was banished from the home, and she whopped him over the head when she found him looking at the medals. There was indeed a handwritten note from the King included.

Losing his father and seeing what wreckage that left behind, and then finding out what a screwup Anzio was, and that his father probably didn't have to die, wore heavilly on Waters. He wrote a song about it that as far as I know doesn't appear on any album indexes, but I think is a hidden track on one of the albums that came right after Dark Side of the Moon, maybe Wish You Were Here. The song describes how his father's regiment was ordered to stay behind to cover the withdrawal of other units and that there were no survivors. It ends with "And that's how the High Command took Daddy from me."

He became very oposed to all war as a reaction to losing his father. He created the Pink character as an alter-ego and created the faux WWII dictator setup to demonstrate the futility of all war and that following anyone blindly is wrong. He did not create the character to glorify Nazis or war. The point he was trying to make was the opposite.