Bomber Harris is an easy target

Ashley Tiffen was a regular on the Times & Star forums as Cayman Beachbum and is often writing letters to the paper on a number of issues. We've bitten the bullet and given him his own online column. . . . .

May I first of all commend the BBC for the making of Bomber Boys shown last Sunday on BBC1.

It is these programmes that will still the mischievous voices who call for the scrapping of the licence fee and those who would turn the BBC into a commercial enterprise to compete with Big Brother and Jeremy Kyle.

The programme provided a balanced view, I think. Thank you BBC.

I find it quite appalling that there are people who try to put todays values on something that happened so long ago.

The world is different today, thanks to technology and Freddie Laker, we can now see for ourselves what is in the world and not rely on what we are told by the great and the good (for great and good, sometimes read rich and powerful).

In the 1930's this country, together with the rest of Europe faced a catastrophe and one that would only be averted by waging total war against a determined and driven enemy.

Britain, rightly or wrongly, had tried to avert war and we can look back and debate the part Britain played in producing a country, Germany, ripe for the leadership of a man such as Hitler. But war it was to be and not of our direct making.

The men who flew with Bomber Command and their Leader, 'Bomber' Harris, represented the man and woman in the street, those who might have fought on the ground or on the Atlantic Convoys, or those men and women who worked in the munitions factories or on the land.

Everyone had a part to play in this war.

No quarter was going to be given and while we can consider, now, how effective aerial warfare was in those dark days of the early 1940s, post Dunkirk, many saw striking at the very heart of the German war machine as the only opportunity we had to take the war to them.

When Bomber Command and Harris' 'Big Wing' reaped destruction on German Cities, it was to shorten the war by destroying the machine that serviced the German armed forces, by whatever means we could.

If bombing factories was not going to work then bombing the residences of those who worked in them was just another military option.

It's easy to see this, with the benefit of the liberal 21st century values as tantamount to mass murder but set this alongside the first major area bombing of a city - Coventry on November 14 1940 - and you can begin to see that the sensibilities of the times were somewhat different.

If Harris, Churchill or all those brave men and women, so many of whom gave their lives to the effort, had stopped to think for one second what the results would be in terms of wives, children, the old and the vulnerable, we would not have won that war.

Yes, maybe there was no need to bomb Dresden, hindsight might tell us that, but we were asked to do so by our then ally, Stalin and without Stalin and the efforts of the Russian people would we have been victorious?

Do the apologists of today think of the millions of Russians who died?

For Churchill to abandon Bomber Command and Harris in 1945 was simply political expediency and should be seen for what it was.

For us to raise a memorial to these brave men, and the men and women who kept them in the skies, today is only right.

I don't see many people saying the bombing of Hiroshima was wrong and many more died as a result of that than any British raid over Germany.

I don't see anyone complaining too much about the bombing of Nagasaki which can also be seen as not necessary.

Indeed, the apologists realise that to question those actions would bring a tirade against them. America, unlike Britain does have a track record of supporting its soldiers, sailors and airmen/women.

No, Bomber Command and Harris are an easy target in a country that seems to cast our heroes aside too easily and we would do well to remember their sacrifice before we judge them.