A price that had to be paid because it was one demanded of us by the Nazis – no apology needed

JUSTIN WELBY, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has apologised for the bombing of Dresden on this its  70^th anniversary. Why he felt he had to do so I do not know; but it fits neatly into the Anglican Zeitgeist of liberal guilt that now grips the church's liberal ethos and makes the  Church of England  ever more irrelevant.

                

                The Archbishop could have just found words of sympathy for the civilian deaths without handing Bomber Command the black spot of an apology, when those pilots who flew those Wellington's and Lancaster's lost 57,000 of their own in helping to destroy Hitler's Germany. 

                'Bomber' Harris,  head of Bomber Command, retired ignominiously to South Africa after the war and Bomber Command was never given a campaign medal to honour its work; unlike every other service in the war.

                

                 Instead, those in power who were delighted to support Bomber Command's efforts during the war's duration, suddenly found themselves pinching and turning up their collective noses after the war; as if they had been present at a dinner party where the release of a particularly smelly fart had caused much embarrassment among these synthetic social arbitrators of moral standards.

                

                  'Bomber' Harris went ignored. The establishment feared (rightly so, as it now turns out) that history would in time, see allied bombings as war crimes. This fear has been given credence by Welby's apology to the German people. What I cannot understand is, on whose behalf he thought he was speaking?

                

                  In the next decade or so, I predict, 'Bomber' Harris will be up there with Himmler and the whole regiment of Nazi war criminals: it would of course be a mockery of the truth. Harris believed that Nazi Germany could be brought down by bombing its cities. It may have been a presumption; but one which worked in the interest of the allies at the time

                 

                 The Nazis  during their blitzkrieg throughout Europe, killed thousands upon thousands of civilians. The Nazis were never regretful, but insisted upon such bombings, to wear down the civilian populations of the countries they invaded, engendering fear and bringing a quick victory,  and it worked throughout much of Europe during Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg years before the UK entered the war.

                

                  I fear that, in the future, our broad-minded, free-thinking, tolerant, and  noninterventionist liberal hegemony will bow to German resentment of what happened to them; and like Welby; some future British prime minister will also apologise for what will be seen by them as a British and American war crime within Europe – such a liberal preferment will indeed come to pass; especially within the EU, which has a mutual dislike for perfidious Albion and the USA..

THE BOMBING RAIDS on German cities like Dresden, had to be done. It mattered little whether all such raids were meant to bring about a quick end to the war or not. The German people and their leaders had to face their punishment for what their leader Adolf Hitler had unleashed on their behalf – a supportive behalf remember by millions of German citizens – even at the end.

                

                I remain 64 years old until the tenth of next month. In my 64 years  I have seen the civilian killings from that Dresden raid reduced from 150,000 to 100,00, then to 50,000 –  and now the latest total disclosed by the BBC is 25,000.

                

                 Ask many of those surviving citizens of the Dresden raid in 1945 who they blame. They, unlike our modern liberals, do not blame Harris, the British or the Americans for what brought about their city's devastation. They blame Hitler for their plight at the time.

                

                I once oversaw (I think, but am not certain, that the channel was Movies for Men)  a documentary on the Second World War which incorporated the bombing of Dresden. A Jewish resident of a labour camp transported to a factory just outside of Dresden to help manufacture munitions, was a witness to the Dresden bombing on that night in 1945.

                

                He described how he jumped up and down, and cheered the allies on as the sky over Dresden lit up and burnt the city to a pulp. He cared little for the German citizens, either young or old. As a Jew, he cheered the allies on. As a Jew he knew what suffering under the Nazis meant, and any death the allies inflicted during this or any other raid bared little resemblance to what the Jews suffered in the labour and concentration camps during the Holocaust.

               

                Ask any Jew whether they think 'bomber' Harris was a war criminal in what he unleashed on Nazi Germany. He was not, and can never be seriously considered to be, unless, that is, there is political agenda in operation – not even the post-war German people would blame Arthur Harris for what happened over the skies of Nazi Germany.

               

                Nazism brought everything that happened to their people upon itself. And as for the 25,000 German citizens consumed by the allied bombing over Dresden. Then a price must be paid for the victory of freedom over either a Nazi or Communist dictatorship – and the price will always have to be counted in human lives, because ruthless dictatorships such as those engineered by Hitler and Stalin will always use their citizens as pawns.

AIR MARSHALL ARTHUR 'BOMBER' HARRIS met like with like; and this attitude did not turn the UK into a nation of Nazis following the war – we did not become like them. Because such strategies for the defeat of Nazism were not formulated from a dictatorial perspective, but from one which sought to end (by 1945) the persecution of the Jews by Nazism. The Nazis were to be defeated at all cost including the bombing of German cities. The Germans, like the European people they held in captivity, were made to pay a price for their captivity.

                

                The price was dear indeed. But it was the price they had to pay. The allies demanded such a cost from those who served within the Western coalition against Germany; and the cost for the Nazis was the demolition of the city of Dresden in 1945. The activities of the Nazis, and their attitude toward those they considered their enemies wherever they came in contact with them, was merciless, pitiful, and wholly contemptible: and the allies response must have had to be equally brusque.

               

                 Today Europe is ripe for plucking, and any determined dictator (probably from the East) could sweep westward and meet with little resistance from modern Europe: a Europe who has yet again come to rely upon America for 70% of its NATO defence – and the Europeans do not even like the Americans.