Why not?
As much as anything else, it now requires those who were loudest in calling for it to reconsider their ordinarily uncritical adulation of Winston Churchill, who pointedly refused to acknowledge the RAF in his VE Day speech. And, like Prince William's service with RAF Search and Rescue, it should go some way to seeing off the neoconservative scheme to abolish the RAF within a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command and run by the Germans.
By no means all of the 55,000 war dead of Bomber Command were involved in the carpet bombing of the German urban working class, overwhelmingly Hitler's Social Democratic opponents, whom that carpet bombing reduced to unhinged mothers carrying the shrivelled corpses of their bomb-baked children around the country in suitcases, while immense clouds of bluebottles gathered on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed. A chapter of my next book will review, among other works on the two World Wars, Professor A C Grayling's masterful and unanswerable Among The Dead Cities.
None of this shortened the War by one second. Quite the reverse, in fact. At the Nuremburg Trials, the terms of reference had to specially written (as such things always are, of course) in order to preclude any German comeback over this. So even then, even we ourselves at least implicitly acknowledged the wrong that we had done. But I repeat that nowhere near 55,000 people - and that is only the number of the dead, not of all those who fought - were involved in this. The rest deserve a memorial. And now, they have one.
As much as anything else, it now requires those who were loudest in calling for it to reconsider their ordinarily uncritical adulation of Winston Churchill, who pointedly refused to acknowledge the RAF in his VE Day speech. And, like Prince William's service with RAF Search and Rescue, it should go some way to seeing off the neoconservative scheme to abolish the RAF within a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command and run by the Germans.
By no means all of the 55,000 war dead of Bomber Command were involved in the carpet bombing of the German urban working class, overwhelmingly Hitler's Social Democratic opponents, whom that carpet bombing reduced to unhinged mothers carrying the shrivelled corpses of their bomb-baked children around the country in suitcases, while immense clouds of bluebottles gathered on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed. A chapter of my next book will review, among other works on the two World Wars, Professor A C Grayling's masterful and unanswerable Among The Dead Cities.
None of this shortened the War by one second. Quite the reverse, in fact. At the Nuremburg Trials, the terms of reference had to specially written (as such things always are, of course) in order to preclude any German comeback over this. So even then, even we ourselves at least implicitly acknowledged the wrong that we had done. But I repeat that nowhere near 55,000 people - and that is only the number of the dead, not of all those who fought - were involved in this. The rest deserve a memorial. And now, they have one.
You seem to forget the thousands of jews, gays, disabled, communists, (I could go on) being thrown into ovens every day at the time. You would presumably have asked Mr Hitler nicely to stop, or have sent more British teenagers to stick bayonets into people and stop bullets as they walked from Normandy to Berlin?
ReplyDeleteMy old man piloted a Lancaster in 1944 until he was shot down and 'luckily' ended up in the hands of the Gestapo. Some of his crew were not so lucky. Think yourself lucky you can write this blog today in freedom.
I am amazingly proud that my father played his part in defeating the despicable and abhorrent Nazi war machine. And so was he.
I am very glad to hear it. So was mine. And so am I.
ReplyDeleteBut the Holocaust had nothing whatever to do with why the War was fought at the time. Unless you are honestly suggesting that the Britain, France, USA or USSR of the 1930s and 1940s would have gone to war specifically in order to protect Jews, Gypsies or homosexuals? Or Communists in the first three cases?
Nor was there much use of the word "Fascist" or even "Nazi", at least outside Hard Left circles, and even then only after the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The word was "German". The film and television depictions of people saying "Nazi plane", or "Nazi tank", or "Nazi submarine", provoke tears and laughter in equal measure.
It was a territorial war between rival powers. One in which we should have been infinitely better off if we had never involved ourselves, and in which we ended up ceding Poland, the original cause, to Stalin along most of the rest of Eastern Europe, and even allowing the USSR to annex Carpathian Ruthenia, previously part of Czechoslovakia, altogether. They have not forgotten. Nor will they. Nor should they.
Everyone really knew that the War had bankrupted us, would cost us the Empire, had put us in hock to the old rival across the Atlantic, and had ended with the territory over which it had been fought merely transferred from one foreign tyranny to another.
So Churchill, in particular, had to confect the myth of a moral crusade, using the Holocaust as its post facto basis. Bomber Command, especially, could not be fitted into that: it had prosecuted the War that was actually happening, in a way susceptible to no rewriting, something at which both his disgraceful memoirs and his largely laughable History of the English-speaking Peoples marked Churchill as a master.
Hence no peerage for Arthur Harris, whose own men called him, not "Bomber" (that bit of rewriting has been successful), but "Butcher". And hence no memorial until 65 years after the end of the War.