Timid politicians airbrushed the role played by Bomber Command from history after attack on city of Dresden killed 25,000
Politicians cancelled the important role Bomber Command played in WWII after a devastating attack on the city of Dresden which killed 25,000 people.
Bomber Command was ostracised at the end of World War II: the supreme sacrifices of 55,000 aircrew airbrushed from the memory of prime minister Winston Churchill who failed to acknowledge their bravery in his end-of-war 1945 speech.
Even Toowoomba’s Don Bennett, the air vice marshal who led the Pathfinder Force was snubbed for a knighthood unlike other squadron leaders.
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There was no memorial erected to the Bombers even though the death rate of 44.4 per cent in Bomber Command exceeded the horrific deaths of those in the trenches during the Great War. There was no medal struck.
The reason? A groundswell of horror from the British population about the bombing of Dresden in 1945.
The attack towards the end of the war obliterated the city and killed about 25,000 people.
The four-day Dresden campaign started on February 13, 1945, and sparked fierce moral debate at the time: whether the destruction of such cultural landmarks – in this case a city housing a major rail centre and more than 100 factories working for the German war effort- at the cost of widespread civilian deaths from the firestorms was indeed justified.
Bomber Command’s chief, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, was felt to have taken his campaign of terrorising the German population into submission too far.
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Prime Minister Churchill fired off a memo within days: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing”.
No-nonsense Bennett wouldn’t stand for such criticism from the top brass. In a letter to his men when war in Europe was declared over, he wrote: “Bomber Command’s share in this great effort has been a major one. You, each one of you, have made that possible. The Pathfinder Force has shouldered a grave responsibility. It has led Bomber Command, the greatest striking force ever known. That we have been successful can be seen in the far-reaching results which the Bomber offensive has achieved. That is the greatest reward the Path Finder Force ever hopes to receive, for those results have benefited all law-abiding peoples.”
Yet it would take many decades for the emotional debates about the bombers to subside.
Five years after Harris’ death, and 50 years since taking charge of Bomber Command, a statue of Harris was erected in 1992, just outside of the Australian High Commission in the Strand in St Clement’s Dane Church. While veterans were being served tea in the Courts of Justice opposite, protesters tipped red paint over the statue.
Then three years ago, during the Black Lives Matter protests and a targeting of statues, English Heritage reviewed its description of the Harris monument, claiming some say Harris was guilty of war crimes. They claimed Harris became the focus of criticism almost immediately because he was consistent and vociferous in the belief that targeting industrial cities would shorten the war and save lives.
But, in 2012, 67 years after the end of the war, Queen Elizabeth II opened a $10m 2.7m tall bronze memorial to Bomber Command in Green Park. Brisbane’s pop star Robin Gibb, of the Bee Gees, and Jim Dooley of The Dooleys had spearheaded a five-year, multimillion-dollar fundraising campaign to honour the courage of the bomber crews.
Mr Gibb sadly died of cancer just before the royal opening, but he had the chance to see the carving of the statue, which shows a crew returning from a bombing mission.
“This is honestly the proudest thing I’ve ever done,” Mr Gibb said back then. “It was so important to finally see that the brave airmen who risked their lives every night to fly bombing raids over Germany and shorten the war were finally honoured, and now it is happening. This memorial is bigger than even the Wellington Memorial and will still be here long after we are gone. It will last forever.”
Ninety-nine year old Dick Raymond from North Wales was a Path Finder in the 83rd squadron, and had bombed cities like Berlin and Nurembourg. He was in a German prisoner of war camp when the Dresden raid took place.
“After the war I became member of an aircrew association and they had bombed Dresden at the end of the war and I said at one of our meetings, ‘they should never have bombed Dresden, a beautiful old city on the edge of the Rhine, with real history, and the war is about to end’, and they said to me, ‘how did you know the war was about to end?’
“Of course they were quite right.”
Mr Raymond found the obliteration of Dresden to be problematic because of the strategy of sending in an American formation to bomb the city in daylight after two waves of Lancasters had already done their work. It wasn’t so much the bombing of the city, but the emphatic nature of it that he felt was controversial.
“Well there was nothing left to bomb,’’ he said.
Mr Raymond said he knew that the Lancasters, of which he was a crewman, were the planes which delivered the biggest bombs killing German men, women and children.
“The only way I can console myself about that is the Nazi concentration camps … it was absolutely horrendous,’’ he said.
He added: “Trainloads of men, women and children taken into a gas chamber, train load after train load. A man called Hitler that shouted he wanted to eradicate a whole race: oh God.’’