A Bomber Command Memorial?

Why not?

As much as anything else, it would require those 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 would see off the neoconservative scheme to abolish the RAF within a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command and run by the Germans, although that role might now have passed to the French in these days of Sarkozy.

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 (and indeed his principal opponents other than Soviet-backed enemies of the Republic itself, not formally abolished until after the War), 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 gathering on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed.

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 thus 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.

Look at Ronald Reagan, who brought so many warmongering old Trots with him from the Democratic Party that they had previously infested to the Republican Party in which they were and are equally alien and destructive parasites. He laid a wreath at an SS cemetery when, as no less a person than the President of the United States, he paid a state visit to West Germany.

And look at Bill Clinton, the original trigger-happy old draft dodger surrounded by people with sectarian Leftist backgrounds. His departure drove those of them who were still Democrats into support for another trigger-happy old draft dodger, but they are only still Republicans under duress, following the failure of Clinton's attempt to do a George Wallace and get round the term limit by installing his wife, an attempt reminiscent of Wallace in certain other ways, too. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton annually laid wreaths at Confederate Army cemeteries. I would be extremely surprised if, as Governor of Texas, George Bush never did the same thing.

A minority of Bomber Command's activities constitute a terrible stain on this country's record. There is no doubt about that. But, even taking that into account, at least Bomber Command does more than bear comparison to the SS or the Confederacy.