PC gone sane

Say “Dresden” to any elder statesmen and you might able to watch them shudder. This is probably the reason why bomber command have not had a memorial built to them despite over 50,000 of those who flew being killed during their operations in the Second World War. Veterans groups have described the unease about the building of a memorial as “political correctness gone mad.”

My great-grandfather was in Bomber Command as a flight engineer and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. I remember visiting him at his house as child and seeing the model of a Lancaster Bomber, the bomber he flew in the war. I remember thinking that this was really cool. But I also remember my grandfather on the other side of my family, who grew up as a teenager in Manchester being bombed by the Luftwaffe. I remember being told about the house next door bombed with two twin children who died in each other’s arms and buried like that as it was impossible to separate them. The description of Dresden after the bombing as like “the surface of the moon” stuck in my mind.

What my great-grandfather did in his “really cool” Lancaster and my grandfather’s recollections of the bombings in Manchester did not fit together. Similarly, when I first saw the ruins of Coventry Cathedral when I came to Warwick, the place it most reminded me of was the Kaiser Willem Church in Berlin, another wrecked Cathedral surrounded by modern post-war buildings. There is certainly a disconnect between the perceived heroism of the people who flew the bombers and what they actually did.

It may be true that the Germans did area bomb cities first as Coventry attests, but this can’t really be an excuse. Measuring yourself as just morally better than Nazi Germany is not really good enough. When you argue with people about it this you usually get responses involving the word “they.” Indeed Arthur Harris the head of Bomber Command put it: “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” They bombed us first and we were getting our own back. This argument holds rather dark nationalist

assumptions.

As soon as you make this assumption, you are bombing a nation instead of individuals living in a city. Women and children can be perceived as complicit in a crime. The fact is that individuals cannot be said to have had agency in any kind of crime allowing retaliation to be morally justifiable. The individual women and children of Dresden did not bomb Coventry, the Nazi state did. Holding groups as autonomous actors responsible for crimes is what we should have been fighting against. Take the example of anti-Semitism. For centuries Jews have been persecuted for allegedly killing Jesus – not the individuals shouting “crucify him” but rather the Jewish people, and not just those alive at the time but their descendents for all time. Needless to say the results of this kind of logic are well known.

The results of dropping bombs on cities intending to set the entire area on fire is little different to having soldiers go into all of the houses into city to promptly have all of the inhabitants shot. But one strikes us as an obvious war crime and the other does not. It certainly takes a different kind of mind to shoot civilians as opposed to simply dropping bombs on a “target” at night, but they could see the whole city on fire. Flying bombers past night fighters and anti aircraft fire to the heart of Nazi Germany as part of a division with a 50 percent casualty rate is hardly a cowardly act. Destroying Hamburg and Cologne was hardly shooting fish in a barrel; the men who did it were brave and no doubt they did it because they wanted to shorten the war and stop Germany. The cities they were bombing (save Dresden) did have some strategic value but the killing of civilians and their homes was the explicit goal. Harris expressed this without ambiguity during the Second World War when he wrote:

“It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories”.

When campaigners for a memorial in London to Bomber Command dismiss reluctance to building this memorial as ‘political correctness’ it does make me angry. Political correctness used to be a phrase used to describe not having Christmas trees so as not to offend minorities or other such allegations that may or may not be true. But this is not political correctness, its nothing like changing the names of minority groups or making occupation names gender neutral; it’s about calling a spade and spade and saying that we should feel “uneasy” about what is considered by many a war crime. The bombing is considered by Dr Gregory H Stanton, president of Genocide Watch to be an act of genocide. We should remember the men who fought in Bomber Command, but we should never forget what they did.