Major new exhibition at Australian War Memorial to honour 4100 Bomber Command airmen who died defeating the Nazis
A major new exhibition at the Australian War Memorial will honour the 4100 Bomber Command Australian airmen who died defeating the Nazis in World War II.
They were some of the bravest fighters in World War II, their theatre of war the most dangerous, with a death rate of 44 per cent.
Yet for decades, Bomber Command, the airmen drawn from across the then-British Empire, was shrouded in controversy and their sacrifice overlooked.
The bombing raids which destroyed the German city of Dresden late in the war, killing at least 25,000 civilians, made political leaders uneasy about praising them – UK prime minister Winston Churchill failed to mention Bomber Command in his speech at the end of the war, despite the more than 55,000 airmen who died fighting for the Allies.
And in Australia, the story of World War II tended to focus on the fight against the Japanese around the Pacific, rather than the European air wars against the Nazis. A memorial to Bomber Command was only erected in Australia in 2005, while it took until 2012 for London to dedicate a memorial to its lost airmen from Bomber Command.
Now, a major new exhibition is being planned for the Australian War Memorial in Canberra to bring recognition to an overlooked group of fighters who played a pivotal role in the Allied victory.
Scheduled to open in 2025, the exhibition will highlight the role played by the 10,000 Australian airmen who served in Bomber Command – and the more than 4100 who died fighting a far-off war in Europe.
“The British planners were hoping to avoid the trench warfare that characterised the First World War and it was thought that by bombing industrial targets and military targets in Germany that they might avoid the blood and violence and avoid the big ground battles,’’ said Lachlan Grant, senior historian at the War Memorial. “They thought it could be a decisive factor.
“But essentially the technology didn’t exist at the start of the war to allow them to do that.
“They weren’t able to fly during daytime, it was too dangerous, so they had to fly at night. They didn’t have hi-tech navigational systems, it was all by dead-reckoning in the early years of the war. It was not until later in the war that they had electronic navigational systems such as radar or the H2S (new technology radar).
“And so the bombing campaign escalates into one that starts bombing area targets in Europe as well.’’
Area targets – widespread areas – included the cities of Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden, as the bombers moved from specific strategic targets to wiping out entire city blocks.
The decision by British military leaders to target civilian areas, much as Germany had done with the London Blitz, was designed to terrify the population and destroy morale in the hopes of bringing the war to an earlier conclusion.
But the flattening of Dresden over two days in February 1945, just three months before the end of the war, posed a significant moral dilemma for many, including Churchill.
“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed,” he wrote in a memo immediately after the attack.
Dr Grant said: “It’s a very complex story given the escalation of the bombing campaign, the decisions that were made.’’
He and colleague, senior curator Shane Casey, have been working for months on the Bomber Command exhibition, which will feature the stories of Australian airmen through photographs, videos and audio exhibits, many of them new to the memorial and never before seen in public.
The memorial will also bring out of storage its famous plane G for George, one of the original Avro Lancasters flown by Bomber Command, of which only a handful are left in the world.
“We are trying to cover this big picture of the bombing war in Europe but through the eyes of the Australians who were part of it,’’ Dr Grant said. “These are people from ordinary backgrounds from across Australia, from all different walks of life, different trades and backgrounds.
“They all volunteered to go over. They weren’t a part of that decision-making process about what were the targets, it was just following what they were tasked to do. The aircrews themselves weren’t necessarily told they were bombing civilians, although they always had a bit of intuition that this was going on. So it’s a very complex story, one that affected so many Australians.
“All of those 4100 Australian dead have relatives; they were sons, and husbands, uncles; and that has a long legacy into Australia today, and we see that with the visitors here at the memorial and the names of all of those 4100 are listed on our roll of honour here.’’
Part of the exhibition will tell the story of the Pathfinders – the elite members of Bomber Command who flew ahead to light up the intended targets, and who were sent again and again into battle. The Pathfinder force was created in 1942 to try to better pinpoint the targets and try to stem the horrific losses of the Allied planes that were being shot down by the Germans.
The leader of the Pathfinders was a tough Queenslander, Vice Air Marshal Donald Bennett, considered one of Australia’s most unheralded wartime leaders.
“Bennett was a real taskmaster,’’ Mr Casey said. “He would often fly in his Mosquito aircraft over a target, observe the results, fly back to England and then meet the incoming crews and have at them as to why they hadn’t marked the target properly.
“He was a real stickler for it.
“The Germans always knew this was happening and they had diversionary targets marked out on the grounds, they would build fake cities, they’d try to fire flares in the air to try to replicate Pathfinder flares.
“They never quite managed to pull it off and Pathfinders would always have these coded flares, they would have a set sequence for a particular night and a timing of those sequences, and all the main force Bomber command crews would know what the sequence was.’’
Dr Grant said Bomber Command, with its 44 per cent death rate, was “one of the most dangerous places for Australians to serve in World War II, and 55,000 of the 125,000 Allied airmen who served in Bomber Command were killed.
The men were sent out on dozens of sorties each, attacking targets such as telecommunications and electronic goods factories and engine manufacturing centres, but also taking out entire city blocks.
“Berlin was one of the main centres of industry in Germany and they were trying to affect Germany’s industrial output,’’ Dr Grant said of the bombardment of Berlin. “But of course in bombing large areas of Berlin they were also bombing houses and this was a deliberate tactic of the RAF.
“The view was that by destroying the homes of workers, you would affect the morale of workers and this might cause a revolution in Germany and bring an end to the war by trying to destroy the morale of the German people.
“This of course didn’t happen.’’
While the Royal Air Force led the bombing attacks on Germany, Allied countries including Australia, played an important part in the operation.
“Right at the beginning of the war in 1939, the Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand governments decided to pool their resources to train aircrew for the war in Europe,’’ Dr Grant said.
“This was called the Empire Air Training Scheme, or EATS for short. And one of the major reasons for this was England being such a small country, it didn’t have the space for training hundreds of thousands of aircrew, so the big open spaces in places like Canada, Australia and Rhodesia were better suited for aircraft training.’’
Recruits trained in Australia, Canada or Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) then transferred to the UK to complete their training and be assigned to a squadron in Bomber Command.
The War Memorial will focus on the journey of recruits who enlisted in Australia and ended up flying with Bomber Command.
“The journey of these Australian airmen from all around our nation to going abroad, is that very few of them had the skill even to drive a motor vehicle,’’ Mr Casey said.
“Yet within a couple of years they’re flying the most sophisticated aircraft in the world at that point in time, the Lancaster.’’
G for George was flown to Australia in October 1944 to become part of the War Memorial’s collection, after it was retired from active missions.
“It was pretty clapped out by that stage, it had flown 89 (missions),”’ Mr Casey said.
Mr Casey said it was vital to bring due recognition to the role played by Bomber Command.
“There’s a long-lasting legacy in a physical sense across Europe of the Bomber Command campaign, in that so many German cities and French cities and Italian cities were badly attacked and still bear the evidence of that,’’ he said.
“There’s also an ongoing resonance I think in the current war in Ukraine, where issues of attacks on civilians are being raised.
“I actually think our exhibition is going to be very relevant because of those issues.’’
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