Very true and its a sentiment I have actually heard once before.
My Grandad built Mosquitos at the factory in West London. He was decanted there along with the entire East London furniture industry in 1939 to build the 'Wooden Wonder'.
The street he and his 6 brother and sisters were born on in Bow was bombed in the Blitz and then cleared by the council after the war. Grandad was a personal friend of Lansbury before the War and Churchill had something of a mixed reputation in the old Eastend in peacetime.
But I remember very well, when I once said something 'clever' and irreverent about the Churchill statue in Parliament Square as a young man my dad telling me, very seriously but gently, that 'if it wasn't for him (Churchill) they would have taken your grandad and your uncles as slaves to Germany'. It was something his dad had said to him.
There was no hyperbole or exaggeration in that. I still find it moving when we pass that statue.
"Dresden is perhaps, after Hiroshima, the name most synonymous with slaughter from the air, and in Britain at least the most controversial."
Interesting. I think you are acually correct but not too long ago I would have suggested - as this article mentions - Rotterdam and Coventry. We have gone from victims to perpetrators in the popular imagination.
In the US at least Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" popularized (if that's the right word) the fire bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut like the book's main character Billy Pilgrim was a POW held just outside the city and thus a witness to event and its aftermath.
It's possible that the fire bombing of so many German and Japanese cities in the last few months of the war may have produced a "mild" nuclear winter effect via soot lofted into the upper atmosphere via the firestorms. The spring of 1945 was uncommonly cold-- German POWs after the mass surrender sometimes died of hypothermia.
Thank you. Wonderful piece. Recently read “Empire of the summer moon” about the Comanches and settlers. Brutal. The Comanches held to and followed their espoused principles the settlers did not. We didn’t follow our espoused principles at Dresden, Hiroshima, My Lai, etc.
If you can find it, I can recommend an excellent book on the Allied bombing campaigns in Germany. It’s called Brandstätten (Fire Scenes) and it’s by Jörg Friedrich. It’s in German, but there are lots of (pretty horrific) archive photos.
Another superb piece of writing! I look forward to the next chapter even if it means the destruction of Dresden. It's tragic that the tactic of bombing cities became a thing, and so much beauty and history has been destroyed. Unfortunately, it does seem it was inevitable, especially with the imprecise nature of the aerial munitions of the time.
Orville Wright: ‘When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.’
It's hard to understand how anyone could have thought this
"Orville Wright later said that: ‘When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.’"
After all railways had been used in the American civil war to transport troops only a few decades before hand.
I recently had the privilege of working with Colin Bell, the 105 year old veteran Mosquito pilot, on his autobiography https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bloody-Dangerous-missions-Germany-first-hand/dp/0349148996/ref=sr_1_1?crid=247WORC78AV3Y&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LEAjyUB7cHFRwemYlWAGHA.uxZv3n4Po07jx5nYfnb-4_yHMkQCmqK1Swl_ZJGJcfU&dib_tag=se&keywords=bloody+dangerous+colin+bell&qid=1770982227&sprefix=%2Caps%2C113&sr=8-1 Discussing the ethics of Dresden, he wonders aloud how the conversation might go had we lost the war and people were living as slave labourers with concentration camps for dissenters outside every city.
Very true and its a sentiment I have actually heard once before.
My Grandad built Mosquitos at the factory in West London. He was decanted there along with the entire East London furniture industry in 1939 to build the 'Wooden Wonder'.
The street he and his 6 brother and sisters were born on in Bow was bombed in the Blitz and then cleared by the council after the war. Grandad was a personal friend of Lansbury before the War and Churchill had something of a mixed reputation in the old Eastend in peacetime.
But I remember very well, when I once said something 'clever' and irreverent about the Churchill statue in Parliament Square as a young man my dad telling me, very seriously but gently, that 'if it wasn't for him (Churchill) they would have taken your grandad and your uncles as slaves to Germany'. It was something his dad had said to him.
There was no hyperbole or exaggeration in that. I still find it moving when we pass that statue.
"Dresden is perhaps, after Hiroshima, the name most synonymous with slaughter from the air, and in Britain at least the most controversial."
Interesting. I think you are acually correct but not too long ago I would have suggested - as this article mentions - Rotterdam and Coventry. We have gone from victims to perpetrators in the popular imagination.
Is that peculiar to my own uprbringing?
In the US at least Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" popularized (if that's the right word) the fire bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut like the book's main character Billy Pilgrim was a POW held just outside the city and thus a witness to event and its aftermath.
It's possible that the fire bombing of so many German and Japanese cities in the last few months of the war may have produced a "mild" nuclear winter effect via soot lofted into the upper atmosphere via the firestorms. The spring of 1945 was uncommonly cold-- German POWs after the mass surrender sometimes died of hypothermia.
Thank you. Wonderful piece. Recently read “Empire of the summer moon” about the Comanches and settlers. Brutal. The Comanches held to and followed their espoused principles the settlers did not. We didn’t follow our espoused principles at Dresden, Hiroshima, My Lai, etc.
If you can find it, I can recommend an excellent book on the Allied bombing campaigns in Germany. It’s called Brandstätten (Fire Scenes) and it’s by Jörg Friedrich. It’s in German, but there are lots of (pretty horrific) archive photos.
Another superb piece of writing! I look forward to the next chapter even if it means the destruction of Dresden. It's tragic that the tactic of bombing cities became a thing, and so much beauty and history has been destroyed. Unfortunately, it does seem it was inevitable, especially with the imprecise nature of the aerial munitions of the time.
Orville Wright: ‘When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.’
Er, why?
It's hard to understand how anyone could have thought this
"Orville Wright later said that: ‘When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.’"
After all railways had been used in the American civil war to transport troops only a few decades before hand.