Tursiops
Monday 25th June 2012 9:13pm
Welwyn Garden City
9,788 posts
Quote: sootyj @ June 25 2012, 1:58 PM BST
Its interesting one for me.
Bomber command more than any other unit of the military took unbelievable casualties, 30% I believe at one point death was a statistical certainty.
The problem is thanks to their rather deranged commander. They killed civilians by the thousand for little appreciable gain.
Where as most modern analysis suggests if they'd joined the US bombers in hitting industrial and oil targets they could have drastically shortened the war.
Harris didn't even care much for his own crews. Progressively stripping his bombers of armour and useful guns.
So I'd say Bomber command should get a memorial (and one that acknowledges its victims). But Harris should lose his.
This is a tough one for me.
My uncle was a sergeant wireless operator in a Pathfinder squadron, the only Englishman I believe in an otherwise Australian crew. He was reported missing when his Lancaster was shot down over the North Sea. He was twenty-one, a brave boy doing his duty. His absence was something I was aware of growing up, and I find that, as my mother and remaining uncles grow older, he features increasingly in their reminiscences. I rather like that I shall be passing a memorial to him each day on my way into work.
But in a war in which there were few moral equivalences, the terror bombing of cities is a crime that rests as squarely on the shoulders of the allies as of the axis, perhaps more so as the Nazis never bought so thoroughly into the idea of 'dehousing' as did Churchill's Cabinet when presented with Lindemann's deeply flawed plan for area bombing. I do wonder how some of those who have campaigned so vocally for a memorial to Bomber Command would respond if the Germans were to build a monument to the Luftwaffe.
While I honour all those brave young men, I baulk at showing any respect to the insanity to which they heedlessly gave their lives. My uncle's name is on the RAF Memorial at Runnymede. Perhaps that should have sufficed.