Jenns, your argument is specious at best, but generally it is a load of old tosh. You are talking about the perceptions of a minority of UK citizens within yet another ‘filter bubble’. Whilst some of those protesting have genuine grievances, quite a few are there because they feel that they have the right to protest...just as long as it’s ‘anti-UK’, ‘anti-military’ and ‘anti-anything that doesn’t fit my world view so it must be wrong’.
I generalise, but some of the nice ‘woke’, middle-class youngsters who are there are the self-same posse who turned up at ‘wee Greta’s’ Save the Planet demonstrations, and disrupted our cities during the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ protests, having been dropped off in Mummy’s ‘Chelsea tractor’ then picked up by Daddy in his Rover, before flying to Antibes on their third holiday of the year. If you asked them to pick out Dresden on a map of Germany then they’d probably look at you blankly. And God forfend if you would ask them when D-Day was or who Churchill replaced as PM in May 40!!
It’s so simplistic to look upon percieved rights and wrongs through the prism of time. Nowadays potential collateral damage and civilian casualties are considered in fine detail by planners and ‘targeteers’! But as Hartley (‘LP’ not ‘JR’ of blessed Yellow Pages memory) stated in ‘The Go Between’…’The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.
Bomber Command took and sustained the fight to the enemy from the very first day of the war to the last. As has been previously stated the offensive not only caused damage to the German war industry and economy, and the morale of the German people, it also tied up millions of able-bodied men and thousands of 88mm flak guns in anti-aircraft defence; the ''Acht Acht, which, used in their other role was perhaps the predominate anti-tank weapon of WWII! But it also ensured the mobilisation of tens of thousands of men who as part of the Technische Nothilfe (TeNo) organisation, were responsible for air raid rescue and response, and relief work. Men for whom the Wehrmacht would have given their eye teeth from mid-1943 onwards.
It is easy evincing moralistic arguments in these strange times that we find ourselves; where the iconoclasts I described earlier seem to have free reign to destroy anything that doesn’t fit their particular world view…and damn those who don’t agree with them.
However, what we should not lose sight of are the men who went out night after night, in some cases literally throwing up or soiling themselves with fear before climbing into their ac, to do the job for which they volunteered.
I remember meeting an Australian Bomb Aimer at a former Bomber Command squadron reunion in about 1990. For an Aussie he was quietly spoken and self-effacing, but, as the weekend wore on he became more outgoing and we had some good conversations. After the Champagne Lunch on the Sunday (well more Champagne than lunch, shall we say!!) he took me to one side, produced a battered old box, handed it to me and told me to have a look inside. Only a bloody DFC and Bar!!! I asked him what he had done to be awarded those. His reply ‘Only my job, mate’!
He was of the late ‘44/early ’45 generation highlighted in John Nichols’ ‘Tail End Charlies’ and he had operated over Leipzig, Chemnitz and Dresden during THUNDERCLAP. I asked him, straight out, if he ever felt any guilt. His reply…‘Guilt, no – but, yes, compassion for those innocent Germans under the bombs’. When I asked about he conduct of the war I’ve always remembered his words…’Those b*s*a*ds started it, we had to finish it’. This was also the view of those BC veterans that I spoke with in my own Squadron Association. No hatred or animosity against the German civilians…but as ‘Joey the Cripp’, as the ordinary German called Goebbels (behind his back, obviously) put it himself ‘Total War – Shortest War’. They had lost too many family and friends to worry about what cosseted ‘woke’ teenagers would think of them in 75 years’ time.
Lastly, being a young, well young-ish, arrogant FJ Nav, I asked the Aussie Bomb Aimer why didn’t he become a navigator, the brains of the outfit, like me?! His answer was refreshingly honest! As an 18-year old in 1943 the RAAF brought a Lancaster to Sydney on a fundraising tour. For a small fee you could see inside the ac. When he realised that the Bomb Aimer lay on top of the forward escape hatch, he realised that he’d found the best position in the ac!!