Bomber Command Memorial dedicated in London
 

London has a new monument at Green Park dedicated to the Bomber Command to complement the Royal Air Force Church of St. Clement Danes on the Strand.
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They Were the Means of Victory

Mr. Cunningham was one of the 120,000 aircrew who flew on a total of 364,514 missions with Britain's Royal Air Force Bomber Command over Germany during World War II. Almost half of them, 55,573, died.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...152914446.html


St Clement Danes is a church in the City of Westminster, London. It is situated outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. The current building was completed in 1682 by Sir Christopher Wren and it now functions as the central church of the Royal Air Force

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Clement_Danes

thIS IS NUMBER ONE On my to do list for oct/St clement danes is a must stop each visit

The awful truth about this memorial is that, even in the euphoria of the 1945 victory, British politicians were so horrified at the destruction Bomber Command wrought, and the pointlessness of the hundreds of thousands of deaths they inflicted on innocent people, that they refused to provide the airmen with any recognition.

Nearly 70 years later, those air-raids are even more clearly valueless. They weren't the means of victory: they simply bankrupted Britain in pursuit of revenge. About a third of Britain's entire WW2 military expenditure was squandered in killing German civilians (and Allied prisoners, and forced labourers from the occupied countries) to almost no discernible military end.

The 55,000 aircrew killed were just as disgracefully sacrificed for practically no useful purpose as their WW1 trenchfodder predecessors.

A year ago, a far more productive group of WW2 heroes were finally recognised: the hundreds of Bletchley cipher clerks still surviving got a personal "thank you" letter - only 60 years late, but still - and a medal. A similar gesture might have made up for the dreadful ignoring of those airmen's bravery - without this vainglorious monument to mass murder.

It doesn't respect those airmen's wasted lives to link their sacrifice so grotesquely to the greatest warcrime Britain's ever been responsible for. This monument is a colossal (and it really is colossal) error of judgement.

I'm not sure I understand you, flanneruk. Do you object to honoring the aircrews or to the monument? Do you have the same opinion on the Menin Gate?

I understand flanner perfectly well - well said flanner - I also decry honoring what could only be called war crimes. Wonder how many Dresdeners will show up at the memorial to thousands of needless deaths in that city alone - a city filled with refugees and of very very little strategic importance - retaliation for Coventry was all it was.

A monument to needless bombings that needless killed many. Pilots were just doing their job. Period. Should not be prosecuted as war criminals (though their superiors like that Mad Bomber guy should IMO) nor rewarded for such barbarity.

Don't bother responding, flanneruk.

Actually, I have to agree with flanneur here.
"They Were the Means of Terror"

it's like us having on the Mall a monument to pilots who throw zillions of tons of napalm on poor Viet Namese villages - jsmith you in favor of that too?

They found 3 bombs in Munich last week, US made and far way form anything of strategic importance.

Oh, oh. The fat is now in the fire.

When was it the laser guided GPS bomb was developed?

I don't recall "please, please, with sugar on it" working very well with Mr. Hitler.

I've always had questions about the British bombing of cities in Germany that had no military value, but then I didn't experience the bombing of Coventry or Rotterdam or Warsaw or the bombing and V1 and V2 attacks on London, so I don't share the mindset of Sir Arthur Harris and the RAF.

My understanding is that the RAF bombed at night and the U.S. forces bombed by day, using the Norden bombsight. The U.S. bombing should have been more accurate than that of the RAF because of the Norden. However, the bombsight didn't work perfectly, especially from high altitudes. It's not surprising that bombs would end up in Munich far from everything of strategic importance. It is also possible that a pilot would eject a bomb simply because he didn't want to return to base with a bomb on the airplane.

Various factors affected the accuracy or inaccuracy of bombs. The raid on the Ploesti oil fields is an example of a raid that was only partially successful for various reasons.

München doesn't have a monopoly on recently discovered bombs. Does anyone else remember a British TV series called "UXB," for "Unexploded Bomb."? It was set in London in the years after the war and, as I recall, was about a couple of soldiers whose job it was to deactivate unexploded bombs in London.

This thread has brought back a memory from many years ago, when I shared a breakfast table at my hotel in London with an elderly Australian woman who was taking a trip around the world. We were discussing possible cities for her to visit when I suggested some German cities. However, she refused to visit Germany because of her memories of the war.

I wonder how Brits would feel about a monument to pilots who rained bombs on Coventry?

Thank you, willit, for remembering the post originated by Cholmondley_Warner and bringing it to our attention.

Occasionally, there will be something that reminds my wife of her childhood on the Clyde. The following occurred in 1941 when she was four years old. She remembers how her mother had to bundleup she and her younger brother to take them to the air raid shelter when the sirens went off.

She also remembers how her father to his dying day
would awake shaking from his memories of the explosion of the Maillé Brézé in 1940. As the skipper of a pilot boat he watched the survivors of the explosion try to escape while he had orders not to approach.
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Wartime Clydebank

Because of the crucial wartime role of its shipbuilders, Clydebank suffered more in the Blitz than any other town in Scotland and was quite as bad as, if not worse than Coventry in the extent of devastation and its lasting effect on the town and community. It was heavily bombed on 13-14 March 1941. Relatively little harm was done to the intended targets. However, the town and the Singer sewing machine factory with its famous clock tower, were badly damaged with over 500 killed and over 600 injured. So extensive was the damage to buildings that over 35,000 people of its c50,000 population were left homeless..


http://clydewaterfrontheritage.com/w...clydebank.aspx



Greenock suffered badly during the Second World War and its anchorage at the Tail of the Bank became the base for the Home Fleet as well as the main assembly point for Atlantic convoys. On 30 April 1940 the French Vauquelin class destroyer Maillé Brézé blew up off Greenock with heavy loss of life following an accident involving two of her own torpedoes. Although this disaster occurred before the Free French Naval Forces were established, many people tend to regard the Cross of Lorraine on Lyle Hill as a memorial to the loss of the Maillé Brézé as well as to the later losses of the Free French naval vessels which sailed from the town. On the nights of 6 May and 7 May 1941 around 300 Luftwaffe aircraft attacked the town in the Greenock Blitz.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenock#Second_World_War

@peg, the aim was at least in the later years to kill as many people as possible. Justified? Given the situation, maybe. Non discriminatory, age, gender, whatever. Phosphates used to burn people. But not a single attack at least remotely directed directly on those identified as the culprits.
Things havn't changed a lot since then.