My Canadian neighbour who has a passing interest in Aviation said to me the other day that he had been thinking that given our history in Aviation the Government didnt seem too concerned about helping it especially given our love of showing off Spitfires and the by now quite ancient Red |Arrows as symbols of the country.
Hesaid the more he thought about it British avaition rather morrored the country as whole in as much as far from winning WW2 Britaina nd along with it its avaition industry were the losers.
This seemed a buit extreme to me in out break between noisily mowing our front gardens and asked him to elaborate.
He said that thinking back from now to the recently passed VJ day that looking back on the main priotagonsist in WW2 the UK had suffered the greatest decline , as he put it -
America emerged unchallnged as the worlds primary economic and military force , nukes and a massive economy benefiting post war from wartime investments in modern aviation manufacturing, the interstate and long distance phone networks
Russia who suffered more than anyone became a super power in the military sense witht he second loudest voice on the world stage
Germany , West at the time dragged itself from the ruins to become Europe's main economy rebuilding its traditonal strengths of engineering and science
France became the truly independent nuclear power in Europe and began to work with as opposed to against Germany to build the economic superpower that is the EU
But what of the Brits, we had at immnse cost in indebtedness tot he USA held the line while the US and Russia built the immense forces that won WW2 in the sense of defeating the Germans but our heroic efforts as aprt of that triumverate came at an appaling econic and politc price, . Our industry was outdated and worn out , our Empire lost (at USAs behest in many cases) Canada, Australia and especially India finding their own places ina changing world and we were elft witha staggering debt to the US. Aviation in UK had focussed on military and high rates of production in heath robinson facilites . While we had great ideas in the Comet and Viscount they were built in pre war tired old factories and of course over time Boeing and Airbus ruled the slies in the same way that our once incomparable merchant navy vanshed under the tide of modern ports and containerisation and loss of Empire.
So in the end it seems we didnt win WW2 at all and that all that gallantry and determination was dissipated in the economic realities of the last half of the twentieth century and that while all the other main protagonists got something positive from it for us it is just misplaced nostalgia and a continuing looking back at a past of empire and ruling the waves and Spitfires over the white cliffs of Dover and that maybe now we should quietly consigned the tokens of a long ago victory to the history books, not to be forgotten but placed in their proper context.
He compared his own country today to us in Britain and how Canada has moved forward overcoming the challenges of separatism and its often very noisy and aggressive neighbour while, in his mind (and his father died at Dieppe) we here have sadly let everything drift away on an ocean of nostalgia and wishful thinking of becoming Great again. ( while wondering perhaps how my own children have chosen to live in Eastern Europe and my neighbour on the other sides children have gone to Japan and a friend father down the roads has son in Berlin and a daughter in Lyon and I wonder what my father and father in law who both spent 5/6 years of their twenties in India defending a pillar of Empire we walked away from when the war ended. Maybe they would think my Canadian friend had a point-they most certainly wouldnt have even picked up their Lee Enfield 303s if they thought a man like Boris Jonson would one day be PM
I'll go and hide in deep shelter now and await incoming