Sunday 8 November 2015

Dark dawn


I keep waking up in the night feeling desperately, tearfully lonely. I wonder what that is all about.

I have no reason to feel like that, as last night was really enjoyable, surrounded by the kids, eating, drinking, watching fireworks and having a really lovely time. Oh, wait a minute, there may be a clue in the 'drinking' bit.

Everyone sometimes gets into a state where negative emotions are just below the surface and rise just above during sleep, when the subconscious is let loose to do what it wants - or needs.

The funny thing is that usually - during the Remembrance Day laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph - I often find myself welling-up at the playing of of Nimrod by the military band, no matter how jaunty I had been feeling a minute before, but this year I was quite cold.

The above photos are of the wreckage of the Wellington Bomber crash in Kent, which my father survived as rear-gunner. Well, of course he survived it, otherwise I would not be here writing this now. I'm not that old.

A younger friend of mine whose grandfather was a pilot and later navigator/bomb-dropper in Bomber Command, showed me before and after photos of a raid in France which was carried out by him.

My friend had written to an air-base West of Leeds where he knew his grandfather was stationed, and asked if they knew anything about him. The first reply was a 'no', but then a different person who had - by sheer chance - been looking into the exploits of the same squadron, and had just found arial photos of a train station in France which had come under attack by his grandfather's planes.

The first photo shows a very large terminus, packed with transport wagons with all manner of tanks and armoured vehicles on them, then the next photo shows a completely destroyed station, peppered with 20 yard-wide craters and littered with smashed military hardware.

Even the road well to the North of the picture was virtually obliterated, though the larger craters show very accurate bombing indeed.

It is still quite dodgy to mention RAF Bomber Command in Germany amongst older people. The raids on Hamburg and Dresden were taken very personally.

14 comments:

  1. I cant imagine you waking up feeling desperately tearfully lonely in the night. Sorry about that is all I can say (and I do mean it). I cant say it ever happens to me regardless of how much or how little I have had to drink.

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    1. Thanks for that. Not the drink? I must drink because I am desperately lonely then, not the other way round. (Joking).

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    2. My mother was having a baby on the night of the Dresden bombing. I only discovered it the other day, she never said. I found it a very sobering discovery in a funny sort of way.

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    3. Thankfully, my father had been shot down before Dresden, so had no direct part in it. 'Thankfully' sounds a bit of a strange thing to say.

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    4. I read Kurt Vonnegut's letters home the other day written when he was in Dresden. Should be compulsory reading for all young people today.

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    5. It must have been very strange for them to have come out of that bunker the next morning.

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  2. Taken personally? So was the bombing of Coventry.

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    1. I know it's not a competition, but 568 people were killed in the Coventry firestorm raid. 25,000 were killed in Dresden in the RAF's firestorm raid - both raids in one night.

      Now I would call this overkill, and it has been discussed many times since WW2, the main topic being whether or not it shortened the war to any great extent.

      I am not putting any values onto this, other than numerical ones. If the British government have left it until 70 years after the war finished to put up a memorial to Bomber Command, then at least they must have had some misgivings about Churchill and Harris's orders.

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    2. I suppose the comparison of numbers must say 'Don't mess with us, unless you're prepared for some response', and also 'Don't go around, starting wars'.

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    3. Is that why nobody ever made records of civilian deaths in the Iraq war?

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  3. I think that more of a comparison can be drawn as Coventry was a legitimate military target, whereas Dresden was bombed because of it's dense civilian population to lower German morale. There will always be civilian collateral damage in bombing, but they should never be the main target. It was a war crime.

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    1. I believe that only the top brass of both sides knew the extent of the horrors of the concentration camps before the eventual photographed liberation, aside from a handful of local neighbours who pretended not to notice.

      As with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was also an element of experimentation to see what fire-storms actually did.

      In the minds of the very few people who gave the orders for both, they were probably seen as justified in the knowledge of the 6 million+ exterminated by the Nazis, and the severe and inhumane treatment of POWs in Japan and on the Burmese railway.

      I don't think that you can belatedly call these things war-crimes with the benefit of hindsight - they didn't know what was going to happen when you encourage scientists to develop weaponry which has never been tried before.

      No lies were told to justify the WW2 bombings, unlike the war in Iraq.

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    2. Dresden had a lot of important war making equipment factories, sorry to be a bit vague, can't recall exact description, very hidden away, and i believe this is why we bombed Dresden. It was not a war crime.

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    3. Maybe we just wanted to break a lot of fine bone china? I know a lot of antique-dealers who think it was a crime.

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