Me and my little group of mates are flying the Dambusters tribute flight tonight on out Flight Simulators (multiplayer). We have the aircraft and scenery loaded, and flight plans.
What really pigs me off is the fact, as previously mentioned, that all Bomber Command aircrew were not recognized for various reasons, including Churchill playing the coward after the event. Whatever the rights and wrongs of bombing are/were, it happened. The aircrew did not have a choice, they had to go.
I couldn't agree more terbert
However, we must consider the context in which Churchill was in during the latter part of the war, and immediately post war. The British War Cabinet had never wanted to bomb civilians from before the commencement of WW2. They believed the agreement between the major powers in 1921 to make it a war crime to do so was correct, but that agreement had never been ratified.
The Germans were repeatedly warned by the British Government from 1939 not to bomb civilian targets or the British would have to retaliate against the Nazis. Typically Hitler repeatedly ignored these warnings in his Blitzkrieg across Europe, including eventually the bombing of British towns then cities. The political pressure on Churchill to then take serious retaliatory action was immense and impossible for him to ignore although he was never happy about bombing civilian targets. My Grandmother and mother used to sum up what most thought after London was bombed;
the Germans and sown the wind, now let them reap the whirlwind.
And so it was that the RAF increasingly went on the offensive over German towns and cities, which grew into thousand bomber raids at night once Arthur "Bomber" Harris took control of Bomber Command in 1943. The raids grew with increasing German civilian casualties, and so much so that Churchill is recorded as saying at Chequers on the 27th June 1944, after watching a film of the bombing of German towns including a raid on Wuppertal when a firestorm had killed more than three thousand civilians a week before,
"Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?" Then followed even greater German civilian casualties, with Dresden the ultimate marker on the 13th February 1945 with over 25,000 killed in the resulting infamous firestorm. Other towns also lost vast numbers, with up to 80% of the civilian population wiped out.
Thus by the war's end, and the truth with at last some human dignity coming out of the Total War excesses, the embarrassment of the British, and American, air forces killing so many civilians arose, just as Churchill and Truman started their efforts to build a united Europe. The Bomber crews were forgotten in this political "game", and were not rewarded for all their bravery and sacrifices. They had become the last victims of the war in the context of post 1945.
What IS so wrong is that no British government, until last year, ever corrected this unjust case and awarded the Bomber Command survivors the campaign medals they so richly deserved. For so many the recognition came far too late, but for the very few left at least something has now been done, with campaign medals and the marvellous memorial in Hyde Park.
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Topic: 70th Anniversary (Read 1342 times)