"Bomber Command, and Coming to Terms with Uncomfortable" Topic

…History

"Across the street from LSE's Clement House, in front of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Chapel, a bronze figure gazes westward along The Strand. The statue depicts Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, Air Marshal and head of RAF Bomber Command from 1942 to 1945. Despite playing a critical role in the Allied victory in the Second World War, at a terrible cost of airmen's lives, today there are few material commemorations of this force. Only in 2011, more than 65 years after the war, was a Bomber Command memorial unveiled in Green Park, the last of the armed forces branches to be accorded a memorial in London, and only then with great controversy. The question begs: Why is it so difficult for modern society to commemorate and confront this branch of service?

Any reluctance to publicly honour the sacrifices of the airmen of Bomber Command is due to the nature of the role they were ordered to carry out. Under Harris' leadership, operations were shaped around strategic bombardment that damaged not only key Nazi industrial sites, but also adjacent areas of civilian inhabitation: the German populace. By 1942, after civilians all over Britain had suffered through the intense, deadly bombing attacks known as the Blitz, many felt that the sole way of breaking Nazi domination over Europe was a wide-ranging bombing campaign. A 1942 recording of "Bomber Harris" perfectly captures such thinking:…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Tough question. Curtis LeMay once said something to the effect of, "if the allies had lost, I would've been tried as a war criminal," which is a reminder that the challenge of dealing with the morality of this is not purely early twenty-first century second guessing.

The best defense of it I have read came from Michael Waltzer, who argued that, in effect, the Nazi regime was so awful that the Allies were justified in using the weapons they had at hand to defeat it.

If the Allies hadn't carried out Strategic Bombing, would the troops and guns freed up made a difference? I suspect enough of one to stretch out the war by a couple of years and perhaps a couple of million casualties…

+1 Royston

To quote Harris, "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

I should point out that there is another Bomber Command memorial in Lincoln:

internationalbcc.co.uk

I drive past whenever I drive into the city.

And, if you are a UK resident, there is a great air spotters' tea bar on the A15 opposite RAF Waddington. It's only a portable building but the tea and bacon rolls are good and there is a big screen showing all local air movements in real time.

Opposite is one of the 'Black Buck' Falklands Vulcan bombers.