Bomber Boys

Last night I sat and watched Bomber Boys on BBC1 starring Colin and Ewan McGregor.
It was a very well put together program and showed the courage of those crews back then and on the whole was very balanced and well presented.
A fair bit was spoken about Dresden and as always, 70 years on, researchers are still taking the view that Dresden was unnecessary. Of course it was unnecessary, all war is but not at the time and there are a few factors which many at the time were unaware of and many are not aware of still.
The argument is that 'the war in Europe was already won' yet right up until March 27th 1945, German V2 rockets were still killing people in England as well as Holland and Belgium. In total 1358 V2's alone fell on London, some 44 on Norwich and Ipswich (there is a V2 crater on one of our neighbouring fields at home) and this was continuing nearly two months after Dresden.
The Germans had only just been defeated in the Ardennes forest, known as 'The Battle of the Bulge' in which the Americans saw the largest single capture of American troops in their military history.
In March, the Allies were still trying to cross the river Rhine at Remagen and V2's were still killing people back in England.

Dresden had a vital railway junction and this was used to move German troops and artillery to attack the Allies advancing in the west and the Russians in the east.
The raid itself was due to be led by the Americans with a daylight raid, being followed by the RAF at night, however, bad weather postponed the USAAF raid and so the British went in first that night.
Dresden was an historic town and had many wooden framed buildings and this is what the firestorm got hold of. The next day, the Americans bombed Dresden as they had been scheduled to do 24 hrs earlier.
How would history have been written if the USAAF had bombed first as planned ? Would Harris still have become the scape-goat of the liberal idealists ?

In March 1945, Joseph Goebbels said to Hitler that Dresden was too good an opportunity to miss. He ordered his Reich Press Authority to publish the death toll in Dresden of some 20,000 people but to add another '0'....
The next day, it was publicised that 200,000 people had died in the raid on Dresden.
A Labour politician in the house of commons, Richard Stokes, a fierce opponent to area bombing, quoted the figures from the German Press Agency to the members of the house and the rest, as they say, is history.

Any death in a war is a regrettable action but as we sit here now, some 70 years later, we do so in freedom and relative peace. This freedom and peace came at a terrible cost and sometimes you have to try and imagine what it was like back then, not now in the comfort of your homes.
Back then, families were being blown apart as V2's landed in civilian streets with no pre-warning, no air raid sirens, the first thing you knew was a massive, ground shaking explosion if you were at a safe distance, followed by the sound of a rocket (they came in faster than the speed of sound), if you were in the impact area, you knew nothing.
Families were still receiving letters to say that their husbands, fathers and brothers were being killed as they fought in Europe and the far east. Try standing there back then and telling these people that the war was 'nearly over'. Tell the thousands of Allied troops who had just been in battle and shot and blown to bits as the German 6th Army and SS Panzer divisions swept through the Ardennes that the war was 'nearly over'.

Germany, although facing defeat, was still making and producing weapons that the world could never imagine at places such as Peenemunde and these only became apparent after the Allied victory. The Germans had designed and started to build a battle tank (the chassis, hull and running gear had been made) that when the allies captured the factory in May, they found the plans to complete the tank and the technology used was only superseded by the British and Americans in the late 1950's !
The earlier raids on Hamburg had killed over 45,000 civilians, over double that of Dresden but Joseph Goebbels compiled maybe his finest work of fiction when he increased the death toll at Dresden ten-fold. It took one anti-bombing Labour MP using German propaganda to suit his agenda and the writings of the Reich propaganda machine were taken as gospel. So called 'respected' historians have continued to use these vastly exaggerated figures in their writings and publications as without them, Dresden was in the greater scheme of things, just another raid.

For Churchill to distance himself from the raid that he sanctioned was unforgivable. The way that the aircrews of Bomber Command were shunned after the war was disgusting.
Bomber Command took the fight to the Germans, they ensured that the Germans tied up troops on anti-aircraft defences, they smashed the U-boat pens, saving thousands of lives in the Atlantic, they broke the back of German Industry which ensured that aircraft, tanks, weapons and munitions would and could not kill allied personnel. They stopped the German counter-attack after D-Day and allowed the Allies to get a foot-hold in Europe. They knocked the very heart out of the wave of mindless mentality and ambition that swept over the German nation in the guise of the Nazi Party.
Bomber Command fought night after night for nearly five years to ensure final victory and freedom.
These men and women of Bomber Command earned and deserve our respect. You can sit and argue from the comfort of your homes about the rights and wrongs of war and the bombing of cities and civilian casualties. You can convince yourself from your own peaceful part of suburbia that the war in February 1945 was all but won and over, you can also believe and use the figures of an appointed liar and book-burning Nazi if it helps your cause but never, never forget that you have the freedom to believe and say what you wish because over 55,000 aircrew from Bomber Command died fighting for your freedom.