UKC

I was thinking about our national relationship to WW2 the other night as Radio 2 repeated a show commemorating the Dambusters raid.

I assume the thinking was that it's ok to celebrate (and it was a celebration) the Dambusters as it's primary target was infrastructure.

I wonder what plans they have to mark the 70th anniversary of the Bombing of Dresden in 2015? Whatever happens, I'll be surprised if 'Friday Night is Music Night' is the chosen vehicle.

In reply to DaveHK: No doubt, had the outcome of the war been different, the Germans would have been celebrating the destruction of Coventry

"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"

MRAF Sir Arthur Harris

In reply to DaveHK: Dave, that wouldn't be very "European" of us

In reply to DaveHK:

A bit like we celebrate The evacuation at Dunkirk,like it was a great strategic victory.

It was a retreat ,a defeat ,and arguably;

We were allowed to escape .

The victory in North Africa ,which is now broadly agreed to have been a sideshow, and the likes of the Dambusters raid were given the full propaganda treatment as the population needed all the good news they could get.

Gave us hope at a dark time.

In reply to DaveHK:

Part of it I suspect is our sense of fair play. About half the dam busters (8 or 9 / 18) aircraft failed to return, much of the rest of the highly (and expensively) trained unit that took part were killed on operations over the next few months.

By the time of Dresden in 1945 the war was won and of about 800 aircraft only 9 or so failed to return.

A far more significant date for WW2 Remembrance should be the night of 30/31 March 1944. 795 aircraft set off to bomb Nuremberg and 96 failed to return. Around 550 RAF crew were killed that night, slightly more than died in the entire "Battle of Britain".

From the distance of 70 years we forget just how deadly war is when fighting an enemy of great resource and equivalent technology.


(these numbers are from my memory - wiki will give more accurate ones)

In reply to DaveHK:
With hindsight, WW2 is one of the very few truly justifiable wars in history. Britain stood, at times alone, against an evil regime, utterly ruthless, and hell bent on world domination. Given that negotiation and compromise was out of the question, anything which brought the war to an end can perhaps be justified. Had lives been spared in Dresdan, would the overall death toll in the war been greater, or less?

Of course the other issue is that hindsight is a great thing, but that the motivations of those in charge may have been more nationalistic than altruistic.

Still, we shouldn't forget as well as it being rememberance day, it's also the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht

In reply to andymac: More German troops and equipment were captured there than Stalingrad