As I mentioned earlier, more information is forthcoming about World War Two, as more information becomes declassified and more sources are made available. But some sources are becoming more scarce. I refer to the veterans themselves, both combatants and non-combatants, military and civilian. Historian Max Arthur is aware of this and is publishing oral histories of the world wars, combining published sources and new interviews to bring us their stories in their own words. Such primary sources are invaluable, and offer an insight obviously unavailable in any other way.
Arthur’s lastest book is Dambusters the story of perhaps the most famous aerial attack in WWII when 617 Squadron attacked three major dams in Germany using Barnes Wallis’ ‘bouncing bomb’. The raid has already been a book, by Australian Paul Brickhill as well as a movie, both called ‘The Dam Busters.’ The name of their first raid stuck to the squad through other astonishing missions of precision bombing. But this book gives us the story through the pilots, the crew, the ground crew, the scientists, and the civilians who lived underneath the dams themselves. It’s an interesting, affecting read.
The campaign by Bomber Command from 1939-1945 has been the subject of some controversy, particularly the further we get from the war itself. Some have said the area bombing of major German cities was a war crime, some even going so far as to compare it to the Holocaust. While the latter comparison is as silly as it is offensive, the overall question does deserve some attention.
My reply is always, what else were they to do? Britain had no other way to fight back against Germany except through Bomber Command. Speer, the organising genius of the Reich, said the bombing was like a second front. In using artillery, troops, aircraft, and other resources for defence and rebuilding, it was impossible for Germany to turn its full might on Russia. The Eastern front was a brutal, ugly, protracted fight – and a near thing. If Germany had been able to keep minimum resources at home and on its Western defences, who knows what may have been the result.
That said the campaign was not beyond criticism. If Arthur Harris had backed the Mosquito instead of the Lancaster, precision bombing using much lighter loads and fewer crew for better results might have resulted, with fewer civilian casualties. But this is decision much easier to see from here, and not from then, when aerial bombing was still a new tactic, subject to much argument. Certainly it can be argued that Harris continued with area bombing when other tactics were available.
The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 by British and American crews is still a source of controversy. For some time, details came from the Nazis, and then the USSR, both of who had an obvious motivation in making the Western Allies look as bad as possible. The city was a major junction for troops heading for the Eastern Front, and the attack was in part requested by the Soviets, who for decades denied such a request existed. It was also the site of factories making parts for bombsights for German bomber, making Dresden as legitimate a target as any other city.
The story of Dresden as a source of shame for the allies was propagated by David Irving. Irving based his figures for civilian casualties on a German source, which was later shown to have been forged, the figures exaggerated by a factor of ten. Nearly twenty thousand casualties became 200 000. Irving also included stories of Allied fighters attacking refugees, for which there was no credible source. Irving’s great shame, and evidence of his lack of credibility, was that once the forgery was discovered, he kept quoting the false figure, even through later editions of his book.
But let’s not forget the 20 000. Dresden was not the most severe raid of the war, but it was late in the piece with Germany on the edge of defeat, and while not a war crime, it could well be morally questionable. I suspect WWII had the greatest parity between civilian and military casualties of any war to that time, and mainland Europe took the greatest brunt of that. The line between civilian and soldier had been blurring through some years and advances in technology, and the bomber erased it completely. You should read Frederick Taylor’s Dresden: Tuesday February 13 1945 for a balanced assessment.
In any case, the argument about Bomber Command should take nothing away from the courage, skill and sacrifice of the young men in the airplanes.
Meanwhile the Dambusters raid was an astonishing feat of visionary engineering combined with courageous and superb flying, and worth revisiting. Peter Jackson is working on another big screen adaptation, with Stephen Fry writing the script. Recently it was announced that the dog belonging to Squadron Leader Guy Gibson would be called ‘Digger’. It seems a small point, but the dog died the night before the raid, and in memoriam, his name used as the codeword for a successful breach of a dam wall. So what? In reality, the dog’s name was Nigger, and this was the codeword that captured the great moment of triumph. (Yes the dog was black – Gibson had many positive qualities but racial sensitivity or a sense of irony was not among them). Fry was immediately accused of rewriting history. But again I ask, what else could they do? Even in the 1954 film, the name was dubbed ‘Trigger’ for the American release, and to use the N word, however accurately, in a 21st century film is commercially unthinkable. And phonetically, Digger is the better substitute, the tongue being in a very similar position on the hard ridge of the palate for the /d/ phoneme as for the /n/, even if the soft palate is doing something altogether different. Perhaps instead of the Director’s Cut DVD, they could release the Historical Stickler’s Cut with the dog’s real name dubbed as necessary – and a prominent offensive language warning.
Meanwhile, surely they won't touch the music?
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