Having seen Lord Flashheart take off into a howling gale on Monday, couldn't help noticing this 747 sitting at Manston. 'Kallita' are an American freight airline that do not normally come into Manston. They are based at a wonderful sounding field in the USA at Willow Run Airport, Ypsilanti. They are however connected to The Department for Defense Air Mobility Command and helped out in Iraq.We still do not have the wherewithall to get the Sopwith's elastic band fixed and there is a nasty pussy sore above my plaster cast that is worrying me. Norah's advice that 'a mustard pulse will sort it' was not very helpful.
Plenty of time on my hands to read the newspapers and travel around the blogs. The Isle of Thanet Gazunder has started back into life with ECR at the editor's helm whilst East Cliff Richard blogspot still has shutters up as does The Thanetonian. Time for OVIT to start another site; 'YAVIT' (Yet another Voice in Thanet is a suggestion?) The Lord Matt B, having inflicted damage on Moores Pine in Wikipedia is now making soothing blogging sounds on The Thanet Star and it makes sense. The shutters up on ZZZEn, or the alternative Thanet Life as it was described last week, has posed my analysts with a small problem on Int gathering and if they don't find a way round the problem, they will have to go! Norah's suggestion was good and is being looked at; " Mr Biggles" she said, " What you need is a wooden horse, like them Greeks at Troy".
A Wooden Horse was used by RAF Pows in the last war to break out of a prison camp and leads in nicely to the argument as to why Bomber Command air-crews in World War 2 were never granted a separate 'campaign' medal'.
This country sent thousands of young men to take the war to the enemy in bombing raids and yet with a casualty rate that exceeded any other Arm
(55,573 pilots and crew lost their lives and almost 11,000 were captured having been shot down or crashed on enemy held territory) their sacrifice was never recognised with a separate medal. I suppose that giving pardons to World War 1 deserters and cowards has been a greater priority than recognising the bravery of air-crews whose life expectancy was worse than a subaltern officer in World War 1! I personally hold Atlee and The Labour Government of 1945 and the post war criticism of The Dresden Raid as the prime reasons why no recognition has been given. When will meally mouthed politicians accept that they tasked our Armed Forces, as they still do, for operations, and that recognition of simple guts and courage is long overdue.
4 comments:
Well done Bertie
Open the debate.
Do include the efforts of Professor R v Jones who, rightly, identified that IFF radar signals transmitted against standing orders over enemy territory were alerting Luftwaffe and doubling mission losses.
Do please name the Bomber Pilot who led the delegation telling Jones (wrongly) that he was wrong.
Leonard Cheshire (is it churlish to mention his part education in german in the 30s as guest of a Nazi admiral ?)
Then mention the difficult to get hold of alleged memo of 5.1.44 by Bomber Harris announcing those pilots who used IFF illicitly had betrayed every bpomber stream they flew with. Naming the pilots concerned as "Idiots".
And then mention the performance. Less than 5% of bombs landed within five miles of the target.
Churchill set up another means to "Set European industry ablaze". He formed the SOE.
mention the redoubtable late Vera Atkins who spent her life never betraying the memory of the SOE girlks she sent to their deaths in occupied France. Who in MI6 had betrayed them ? Some flung alive into furnaces by Nazis somehow later exempted the Nuremberg trial and set secretly to work for UK (Horst Kopkow for example)
Then, while we are at it, were Kennedy (US ambassador) and those in the Wallis Simpson group giving secrets awau to the Nazis ?
And do not forget to mention the betrayal of the Arnhem mission. The creation of the Bilderberg Group, the Vatican ratlines for escaping Nazis.
The best way to honour the dead is the TRUTH.
Bertie
Right up your local aviation street.
Start your inquiries re WW2 with the crashed Messerschmidt of Luftwaffe Werner Bartells at Kingsgate.
Bear in mind the lessons of the Oslo person as a reasonable gauge of what Bartells would have known.
If you conclude that under the Nazi weapons development system Bartells would have known about tracking IFF.
And our side continued to let "Idiot" pilots betray bomber streams ....
There better have been a good payoff for all the preventable slaughter that occurred to Bomber Command ?
Rick, I hear what you are saying but the bottom line is that young men of our last generation were put in 'harms way' at an incredible attrition rate in Bomber Command. Their sacrifice was never acknowledged whilst we still venerate the 'Few'!
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