The
result is a work of wishing away, of ignoring time, place and moral
difficulty. The possibility of achieving something even slightly like
the Vietnam memorial in Washington, which also had to recognise heroism
applied to a questionable purpose, was ruled out from the start. There,
many veterans expressed a wish for something classical, but once Maya Lin's reflective wall of names
was installed, few wished it to be otherwise. I don't want to deny old
men, who endured more than we can imagine, the ability to remember. But
there could have been better ways than this.
So, he didn't much like it. He managed to squeeze a few mentions of an opportunity lost to portray regret. Complex moral issues or better yet a have created a very modern structure. He seems a little upset that the 80 year old airmen wanted this design. He even managed to fit in a former Tory party treasurer Lord Ashcroft mention. 15 commenter's on CIF mostly disagreed with him.
Johnathon Jones wrote a similar article on Friday. Slightly more critical of both monument and bombing. So far 993 comments and counting. I've read about a hundred. I'd estimate he has less than 5% support for his views on either the monument or his examination of the bombing war . And in the main they aren't rants. They are measured and knowledgeable pieces. Some are factually incorrect, but not wildly so. There is a comment that the Germans only bombed civilians by accident when a lost plane jettisoned its bombs over a city. That was actually the start of the Blitz, as the Luftwaffe had orders not to bomb London. City bombing had been going on since at least 1937 by the Japanese in Shanghai and at Guernica by the Germans. And the British had been bombing rebellious Iraqi tribes people since the 1920's.
On the history, where much of the criticism comes from from the readers, neither article is factually wrong. They both acknowledge the huge losses of bomber command. 55,000 killed. {the US 8th airforce lost about half that number.} They both explain that the crews were very brave to fly... But then comes the inevitable ethical debate about bombing civilians.
Had Gadaffi survived he may well have faced war crimes for bombing rebel cities. Assad is going to be in the dock for shooting unarmed rebels and using artillery. But this is now. Not 1941. revisionist history makes me boil. Context is everything in history. What's the point of asking if a modern family would go to a medieval hanging as a fun day out?
In truth the RAF had a poor war. Fighter command and the tactical air
force in France in 1940 were almost completely destroyed. The RAF had insisted on a heavy bombing force pre war, when resources were really scarce and funding below requirements. Yet when war broke out the bomber force was completely inadequate. It didn't have a heavy bombing force at all. Just some rather poor medium bombers. The RAF found it could not find its targets. If it did find them it suffered very heavy casualties, and even if it hit them its numbers were too small to achieve much and its bombs often failed to go off at all. In 1941 more RAF aircrew were killed on operations than German civilians by those same operations.
Navigational aids were non existent. Maps useless. Training unrealistic. Results negligible.
That's how 'bomber ' Harris got the job in the first place. He was to sort out RAF Bomber command's failures and make them the war winning weapon that had been promised. And although he never achieved that he certainly transformed the air war.
Harris was as single minded as Field Marshall Haig had been in the last war and with much the same results. The necessary equipment, tactics and technology just weren't available at the time to break the deadlock. So the air war became an attrition war. That's a very important point in any discussion about the effectiveness or necessity of bombing.
The bombers {Commonwealth and USA} had to attack targets where they could do damage. As in the UK, German barracks were in cities and towns. As were the man train terminus and the docks and the depots and the warehouse and factories. And once the attrition war was decided on, the bombers needed to attack targets the enemy must defend.
Amongst the CIF writers are references to the flak guns ,the German 88 mm, 15,000 deployed within the Reich as AA guns, but could have been used as Anti tank guns that were lethal to tanks if diverted to front line use. In 1940 the Germans had about 2,000 searchlights. By wars end this was almost 14,000. And each searchlight and flak post needed manpower day and night. The Luftwaffe estimated it took 3,300 88mm shells to bring down an aircraft. The expenditure in AA ammunition was so great that there were shortages in the German army from the start of 1943 that were never replaced.
This is all true but it would be a pretty poor result if 55,000 men died to keep just 15,000 AT guns and 300,000 boy soldiers and injured soldiers from the front lines.
This is all true but it would be a pretty poor result if 55,000 men died to keep just 15,000 AT guns and 300,000 boy soldiers and injured soldiers from the front lines.
That German armaments increased during the critical 1942-1945 years are used as an explanation that the bombers failed. That isn't true. The increases came from structural, resources priority and procurement changes set about in 1940/41 when Germany belatedly realised it was going to need a whole lot more equipment than it was making. And if the bombing was ineffective why did Germany attempt to move its factories underground. Just imagine what that actually means. Moving complex machinery and all its civilian workers , and outright slaves too, into underground caves where light, cooling, sanitation, air and power all have to be supplied. Where space is a premium. No one voluntary builds a factory underground.
It is true that the area bombing campaign was wasteful. German industry actually fell apart once the rail and waterways were knocked out and the fuel plants damaged. The Germans were short 36.5 million tons of coal in winter 1944.The coal was in the Ruhr and the Ruhr was almost sealed off because of destroyed infrastructure. If Harris had been less of a fanatic he might have been able to achieve a more rapid collapse of the Axis without the continuation of Area bombing into 1945 when the heaviest and most destructive, and probably unnecessary, raids took place.
But that must not be seen in isolation. That's my issue with the Guardian writers. War is war.
All of WW2 was about attrition. It was a more mobile WW1, but still an attrition war. From the sea lanes vs submarines to the artillery duels and fuel supply issues of the desert war to the slog through Normandy and the Ukraine and up the Solomon Islands and the jungles of Burma. It was an attrition war. Whoever had the most usually won.
This was especially true in the factory war. By the time the 40,000 airframes for German fighters were produced in 1944 {up from 3,000 in 1941} there was no longer the fuel, spare parts, engines, pilots, trainers or logistics available to get them into the air.
The RAF forced the Germans to fight a battle they were not prepared for and did not want to have to fight at all. By attacking the Germans had to defend. With the American air force in the war and long range fighters and better night time aids by the end of 1943 the Luftwaffe was running out of planes and pilots. And each time a target was hit they lost a little more replacement production too. Whether from the factory making piston engines or the killed skilled worker or the rubbled railway that the train bringing raw materials could not now pass through. By 1944 the German airforce was on the defensive, largely unable to mount any kind of attack. The thousands of pilots needed to attack the bombers over the Reich had had to have been withdrawn from Russia.
So by that criteria the men of Bomber command achieved just as much as any of the other services. The 'did bombing achieve' question is decisively answered. Yes it did.
Air power never did what the bomber barons had promised. It did not end the war. It did not reduce the enemies means of production to the point that they could no longer continue. . The civilian deaths were terrible. But all WW2 was a war against civilians where the fighting took place. Military deaths, including all the executed and starved prisoners of war, 22-25 million. Civilians killed totaled from 40 to 52 million, including 13 to 20 million from war-related disease and famine.
The USA's strategic bombing survey estimated a maximum of 600,000 German civilian deaths by bombing. Some 10 times the UK's number. Japan had around 500,000 civilian dead. Shocking as these figures are they still account for only 2% of WW II civilian deaths and leave 50 million other dead civilians killed in war by bombing and other means.
The number is too huge to contemplate.
But without the bombing it might well have been even higher.
I don't know much about architecture .
For a London memorial the bomber command one looks like it would certainly complement in
size and scale, materials and design the other memorials and monuments
in and around the Park Lane/Green Park area. But its not really my field so I'll leave that to the Guardian arts writers.
I suggest they also leave the moral history lesson to others.
War is cruelty.
There's no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be
over.
-William Tecumseh Sherman
-William Tecumseh Sherman
for the history buffs only
In BQ's opinion, only the Royal Navy and merchant marine can claim to have had a really successful war. The Navy's successes far outweighed its failures. They triumphed in almost all of the battles they fought and defeated the submarine menace so that it was effectively over by 1943. Not a single German submarine got to any of the boats on D-Day. Or sunk any of the flotilla that invaded North Africa. Of the first wave of boats on D-Day, the minesweepers, they expected to take 50% losses. They didn't take one. The navy recused the army from Dunkirk. Again from Norway. Again from Greece and again from Crete. In Greece and from previous actions Royal Navy loses had been so heavy that the RN was in danger of having no capital ships left.
There was a gloomy conference about whether it should even try to evacuate troops from Crete.
"The Navy has never let the Army down" said Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, one of our greatest and least known Admirals.
And despite the heavy naval losses they prevented German sea troops from landing and evacuated a large part of the army successfully.
And despite the heavy naval losses they prevented German sea troops from landing and evacuated a large part of the army successfully.
The navy existed to protect the sea lanes and to transport the army to and from its destination. In WW2 It achieved that spectacularly.
The army, like the air force had a much less successful war. Undeniably the best fighters on the allied side in France up to Dunkirk, the army was still defeated and almost destroyed, and lost all of its heavy equipment so painstakingly built up on meager budgets since 1931. The army enjoyed early success in Libya and Eritrea but was soon heavily defeated in the desert, Greece and Crete. The far east was a shambles with the Japanese achieving their D+28 week goals in 6 weeks and loss of the far east almost to India. The threat of a Japanese assault on Australia found the British Empire without any resources to send and one of the Empire's best allies, who's defence had always been implied, had to rely on the USA for protection.
It wasn't until late 1942 that the army came good and became a match for the Germans. By 1944 it was spent. Fighting troops had been in the line too long and were tired and replacements had been defending coastal forts in he UK for years and were not ready for battle. The British army was relatively poor after D-day and the battle honours, excluding the elite units, are few. Also bomber command was taking the brightest and best of available young men for the air war. The army had to make do with what was left after the navy had also taken its share.
Fighter command and the tactical air force in France were almost completely destroyed. Poor tactics and poor communications and a failure to realise that because our AA fire was ineffective the enemies wasn't. It was lethal. The battle of Britain was a great success but after the RAF used its its planes on sweeps over France. The idea was to scare up the Hun into a fight. The Germans simply attacked the sweeps when they were tactically advantaged and ignored them when they weren't. Many RAF planes were lost and so many pilots too, in a fairly pointless 'dawn patrol' mentality.
Raf coastal command had been so neglected {for want of more bombers} between the wars that it was totally inadequate for its very important and soon to be realised essential role of protecting the seas from raiders and submarines. It took a long time to become properly equipped and until 1943 to be effective.
It really wasn't until 1944 that both RAF fighter and bomber arms became truly powerful in their roles. The Typhoon and Tempest rocket firing planes had a success rate against armoured vehicles attributed them that was so high, that even the US army requested RAF strikes from them. Quite unprecedented.
Post war evaluation revealed that these strikes were never as effective as thought at the time. The large numbers of claimed tank kills was greatly exaggerated. A plane traveling at tree top level at 400 mph and trying to hit a vehicle the size of a panel van with what amounted to little more than a firework device was not going to be very accurate. But the Germans really feared them. One senior panzer commander was incensed and wrote of the stupidity of his crews in leaping from a 40 ton, steel protective container to rush around outside amongst the explosives and bullets. German troop movements slowed to a crawl and then became a night time only operation.
This is just an observation. There is no 'who's braver than whom.' In battles fought and own losses vs enemies, and objectives achieved the royal Navy seems a clear winner.
The army and air force might claim that is because the navy totally hogged the tiny defence budget from 1931 up until 1937. Admiral Cunningham said the Navy's success was down to tradition.
And having a former first lord of the Admiralty as PM probably didn't hurt either.
It was once noted to Admiral Cunningham that a defeated opposing Admiral had kept a
copy of the 'Life of Nelson' by his bedside.
'Well, he
evidently didn't read it.'
