5th February 2015

Tendring Topics……..on line

 Eye to Eye with ‘Private Eye’

           

On 24^th January I wrote critically  in this blog about the Westminster Abbey authorities flying our national flag at half-mast in mourning for the death of the King of Saudi Arabia, and of the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales, a future Defender of the Faith (our Faith!) flying to that benighted country to present their condolences.  I asked if we really needed oil – and arms sales – so desperately that we were prepared to take as an ally a country whose ethos is the exact opposite of the ‘British values’ that our Prime Minister claims to be so keen to promote.

            I have just read the copy of Private Eye published on 23^rd January, just the day before I published that blog, in which they gave their view of the United Kingdom’s relationship with Saudi Arabia.  Here it is:

            While David Cameron stands shoulder to shoulder with world leaders protesting at extremist assaults on freedom of expression on the streets of Paris, his government continues to ignore such intolerance when practised by a government with which the UK wants to do business.

            As ‘Charlie Hebdo’ was attacked, Saudi Arabia was meeting out the first of 1,000 lashes to blogger Raif Madawi.  Yet so keen is Cameron to cultivate the despots in Riyadh that, not only did he not denounce the flogging, but his government continues to cover up the corruption that sustains the barbaric regime there.

            ‘Private Eye’ is currently engaged in a freedom of information battle with the Ministry of Defence for details of its complicity in corruption on a £2 billion defence contract.  The government refuses to provide it on the grounds that exposing such dirty secrets would harm relations with Saudi Arabia.

            Given that the oppressive state spawned the group that claims responsibility for the Paris attacks (not to mention the 9/11 bombers) al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps the ‘relations’ so highly valued by the British government would be better served by exposing the Saudi regime rather than covering up for it.

          
                King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23^rd January, the day that Private Eye went on sale. In that issue it commented on the jihadist murders in Paris and on the world-wide demonstrations – led by the western world’s political leaders - supporting ‘free speech’.  It was unable though to comment in that issue on the obsequious haste with which some of those same leaders flew to Saudi Arabia to offer their condolences on the loss of the leader of a country that prohibits free speech, bans the practice of any religious faith other than its own fundamentalist version  of Islam, inflicts cruel and  barbarous punishments on it own people, holds democracy and human rights in contempt, and generally makes Saddam Husseins's Iraq, Colonel Gadafi's Libya and President Assad's Syria, seem by comparison to have been earthly paradises of liberty and tolerance.

          In view of this, the cover of the Private Eye of 23^rd January shown above, was remarkably prophetic. The  'speech bubble' shown emanating from the world's leaders is surely more accurate than 'Je suis Charlie', the slogan of the 'free speech' protesters!

‘Man’s inhumanity to man!’

            I can’t imagine a crime more heinous than that of IS (Islamic State) in burning alive, in a cage, the unfortunate Jordanian airman who fell into their hands.  The wickedness of the action was made worse by IS’ pretence of negotiating his release in exchange for a captured failed suicide bomber.   These ‘negotiations’ ensured IS the publicity for which they had hoped, and gave false hope to the victim and his friends and relatives.  I have little doubt that his fate was sealed from the moment of capture.

            The airman’s dreadful death brought to my mind another shameful incident almost exactly seventy years ago.  I was a prisoner of war at a ‘working camp’ in Zittau in eastern Germany.  Throughout the bitterly cold winter of 1944/’45 we had watched civilian refugees from the inexorably approaching Eastern Front pass through the town; old men, women and little children. Many were trudging through the snow pulling little carts with all their belongings.  They were making for Dresden, 60 or 70 miles to the west where they’d be sorted out by the German Red Cross and sent to relatively safe areas for refuge.  It was obvious to all that Germany was defeated and World War II coming to an end.

            On the night of 13^th February 1945 Dresden was flattened by high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped by hundreds of RAF bombers.  The centre of the town – not the railways and factories on the outskirts – was the bombers’ target and it was crowded with hapless refugees. The RAF bombers departed before the dawn but bombers from the USA continued during the following day. The number of dead is estimated to have been between 22,000 and 25,000.  Many of them were killed by collapsing buildings, others were asphyxiated by smoke.  They were the lucky ones.  A substantial number, men, women and little children will have been burnt alive – just like that unfortunate Jordanian airman.

            The crews of the RAF and American bombers were ‘just obeying orders’.  They didn’t know on whom their bombs were falling and anyway, the Germans had done much more dreadful things.  The bombing of Dresden took place just a few days after the Soviet Army had liberated the Auschwitz death camp in Poland and had told the world of the horrors they had discovered there.   Those aircrews were quite different from the killers of IS who had allowed their victim to hope for release and had then murdered him in the cruellest way that they could devise – a way that was guaranteed to torture not only their victim but those who loved him.

            Those aircrews were quite different from the cold-blooded torturers and murderers of IS. But their victims, whose bodies were found among the still smouldering ruins of Dresden, suffered exactly the same agonies as that Jordanian airman. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the events of that February night almost exactly 70 years ago set my mind on a course that ended with my repudiating all acts of violence and, just three years later, joining the religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and embracing the Quaker testimony against all wars.

Late Note.  The action of the Jordanian Government in hanging two jihadist prisoners (including the woman whom the government had been prepared to exchange for that airman) was understandable but regrettable.  It is only by breaking the cycle of vengeance that we can hope to achieve peace.

           

Week 7 2012 16.2.2012

Tendring Topics....on Line

The Thirteenth of February

           Tuesday of this week (13^th February) was the 67^th anniversary of an event has played a major role in moulding the political and ethical attitudes that motivate me in the weekly production of Tendring Topics….on line.

  Regular readers of this blog will know that I spent the final eighteen months of World War II at a working ‘camp’ of thirty ‘other rank’ British POWs in the small East German town of Zittau, at the point where the frontiers of Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland now coincide.  By February 1945 no-one in Zittau, not ourselves, not our guards, not the conscripted foreign civilian workers, nor the German civilians with whom we were in daily contact, had any doubt that Germany had been defeated and that the war would be over within weeks.  The failure of the Christmas offensive (‘the Battle of the Bulge’) in the Ardennes had ended any hope of a German victory or of a face-saving negotiated peace.  The RAF and American Air Forces ruled in the skies, the news from the Western Front was uniformly bad and in Zittau the sound of gunfire from the east had grown from a distant murmur to an ever-deepening roar as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably through Poland into Germany itself.

Throughout that bitter winter the flow of refugees westward through Zittau  grew from a trickle to a steady stream.   There were old men (the young and middle-aged ones had long since been called up), women and little children.   There were British and allied prisoners of war, still under guard, and conscripted foreign workers mainly from Russia and the Ukraine.  There were defeated units of Germany’s allies – Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, renegade Cossacks.  Some were in ancient lorries fuelled by Holzgas  (a flammable gas produced from smouldering wood chips). Some had wagons drawn by oxen.  All the fit horses had been commandeered by the Wehrmacht.  Many trudged through the snow with all their worldly goods piled onto small handcarts. As the thunder of battle drew closer, folk from Zittau joined them.

A fellow-prisoner and I, with our German guard, returned to Kurt Kramer’s wholesale grocer’s premises in Zittau’s Neustadt Square, from delivering  groceries to local retailers, to find that a young woman refugee from Silesia had climbed to Kramer’s top storey and, in despair, thrown herself to her death on the  cobbles of their yard.

The refugees were heading for Dresden, sixty or seventy miles west of Zittau, where they would be sorted out and distributed to the rapidly diminishing areas of Germany that were still relatively safe.  As the second week of February drew to its end, Dresden was packed with them.

Dresden's Lutheran 'Cathedral'. Almost totally destroyed in the bombing raids of February 1945 but now lovingly restored to its former glory.

It was then that the Western Allies struck. On the night of the 13^th February wave after wave of RAF bombers rained fire and destruction on the capital of Saxony, a beautiful historic city crammed with refugees.  Thousands of incendiary bombs created devastating firestorms from which there was no escape. Zittau’s inhabitants saw the westward sky blood-red from the inferno.  With dawn the RAF withdrew and bombers of the US Air Force took their place. Estimates of the dead range from a conservative 30,000 to as many as 100,000.  Among them must have been many of Britain's and America's allies.

I have heard all the explanations and all the excuses.  I remain convinced though that those raids, slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians at a time when the war was all but over, was a war crime and a crime against humanity.  It was not, of course, on the same scale as the Holocaust or other crimes committed by Nazi Germany – but would we really wish to make such a comparison our excuse?

My memory of the cruel slaughter of the innocents in Dresden changed my whole outlook on life and was a major factor in the decision of my wife and I in 1948 to turn our backs on violence, whatever the provocation, and to join the peaceful Quakers.  

‘Full of sound and fury!’*

            ‘Fury’ is a word much overused in the press.  There is ‘fury in the city’ over the suggestion that heads of huge business corporations might be overpaid, ‘fury’ in the House of Commons at the obstinate refusal of the Bishops in the House of Lords to rubber-stamp their plans to penalise the poor, ‘fury’ almost every day in the Daily Mail about ‘benefit scroungers’ being subsidised by hard working Daily Mail readers.

  I try not to get furious too often.  I am sure that at my age it is bad for me. Just occasionally though I read in the press, or hear on radio or tv something that brings me very close to it!  Such a moment occurred this morning (10^th Feb.), making me choke over my boiled egg and toast as I watched a review of the daily press on the BBC’s tv Breakfast programme. A newspaper sympathetic to the government carried a headline telling us that one of David Cameron’s closest advisors (that usually indicates that the government is giving some thought to the matter) suggests that old people should carry on working longer and should downsize their homes. 

Why on earth, the advisor no doubt thinks, should an ancient widower like Ernest Hall, who is no longer a viable ‘human resource unit’ and whose children have long since left home, continue to live in comfort in a three bedroomed bungalow?  ‘A one-bedroomed flat would be ample and much more appropriate for his needs. At ninety he’s probably too old for most paid work but possibly he could take up some profit-making hobby, knitting or basket-making perhaps, that could help to prevent his being quite such a burden on the state’.

              What is the point of urging old people, well past their prime, to carry on working when there are tens of thousands of young, fit and active people looking in vain for jobs?  The government (well, I suppose that one can’t expect too much from a group that probably holds the biggest concentration of millionaires in the UK!) seems to persist in the delusion that unemployment is mostly, if not entirely, the fault of the unemployed.  Government efforts to reduce unemployment concentrate on making young people ‘employable’ – how to prepare a CV, how to write a winning job application, how to prepare and conduct themselves during an interview!  All that would be fine if there were jobs for which people could apply and be interviewed but, thanks largely to the government’s own policies, there aren’t. Perhaps we’ll finish up with having the best-qualified army of unemployed in Europe!

We learn that only one in five of ‘graduates’ from the government’s much-vaunted training schemes obtains a job within a year. That is about right, bearing in mind that nationwide there are at least half a dozen applicants for every job vacancy! 

           

As for the accommodation down-sizing - when the palaces, stately homes, desirable residences and second (and third) homes of the wealthy have been occupied to capacity by the homeless, I’ll think about the future of the modest bungalow that my wife and I bought with our blood, sweat, toil and tears in the 1950s,  '60s and '70s; the home in which, five and a half years ago, my wife’s life came to an end, and in which I hope  mine will come to an end too too!  I don’t think I’ll need to be consulting an estate agent just yet!

            Yes – it does make me furious to think that instead of the better, fairer and more peaceful future for which my generation thought we were fighting in World War II we find ourselves in a grubby and materialistic world of sleaze and corruption, of bankers bonuses and of a press controlled by non-tax-paying cosmopolitan billionaires owing loyalty to no-one but themselves; a world of wealth and privilege for a small minority and homelessness, hopelessness, poverty and enforced idleness for the many.

            I can only hope and pray that this triumph of Mammon is temporary and that goodness, justice and peace will ultimately triumph – though I no longer have any hope of seeing even the beginning of the beginning of that victory.

*From Macbeth again and perhaps particularly appropriate to politics today ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound  and fury, signifying nothing’

Toward a Godless Britain?

          It seems likely that the prohibition resulting from a court case, of official prayers at the beginning of local Council Meetings will be short-lived.  Providentially, the Government’s shortly to be enacted Localism Bill will restore the right of local authorities to begin, as Parliament does, with a short period of prayer if their members wish it.

            What disturbs me about this matter is the implication of the National Secular Society, which I haven’t heard effectively refuted, that religion is a private matter having nothing to do with local or national politics, that should be practised only by consenting adults in a church or other special building intended for that purpose.  As a committed Quaker and a communicant member of the Church of England, I believe the exact opposite to be true.  Our religion should inform and guide our every thought and action.

            George Bernard Shaw, no great lover of the Church, said that our faith does not consist of the things that we think we believe, but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.   Jesus said that those who heard his words and acted upon them were like the man who built his house upon a firm foundation. We may indeed hear the word of God in Church, Meeting House, Mosque, Temple or Synagogue but we act in our daily lives. St. Theresa pointed out that, ‘In this world God has no hands but ours to do his work, no feet but ours to run his errands’.

Certainly, before beginning their Council business, Christian councillors should pray that they may be guided to speak and vote in accordance with God’s will.  As an Anglican I am happy for that prayer to be formal and vocal. As a Quaker I’d be equally happy for there to be a few minutes silence at the beginning of each council meeting to be used for silent prayer by those who wish to do so.  Even committed atheists might find a few minutes of quiet reflection helpful before the business of the meeting begins.

            The National Secular Society has the impertinence to consider that it speaks for the majority of Britons.  I am quite sure that it does nothing of the sort.  It will surprise me if the recent census doesn’t reveal that in the UK a comfortable majority of the adult population do have a religious faith and that the Christian faith is the one with the greatest number of adherents.  I am personally acquainted with dozens of committed Christians – Anglicans, Quakers, Roman Catholics, Methodists and United Reformed Churchmen.   I don’t know a single member of the National Secular Society.  Do you?

             I know, none better, that Christians have done some appalling things to each other and to other people in times past.  But I also know that it has been Christians ‘dabbling in politics’ who have pioneered every worthwhile reform that has taken place in this country during the past fifteen hundred years*.  Christians, from King Alfred the Great onwards, have pioneered education for the masses, have cared for the poor and provided shelter for the homeless.  It was a Christian priest, John Ball of Colchester, who preached that When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ He went on to become a leader of the medieval peasants’ revolt, and paid for his egalitarianism with his life.   Christians led the campaigns against the slave trade and against the exploitation of men, women and children in the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of England’s industrial revolution.  Christians pioneered prison reform and the provision of social housing and medical care for all.  Christian Bishops in the House of Lords today, lead the opposition to the penalisation of the poor and disadvantaged to help solve national financial problems created by wealthy, but greedy and incompetent, bankers.  Christian charities such as Christian Aid, Cafod and Quaker Peace and Service help people of every race, creed and colour world-wide.  

            Yet the National Secular Society would like to see Christian – and no doubt every other form of worship – confined to special buildings serving dwindling congregations and having no connection with their ‘real’ world!   We must not let them succeed.

*  It could be argued that Christian concern about material matters has a much earlier beginning. The triumphal prayer of Mary, when she knew she was to be the mother of Jesus, contains a note of distinctly radical and very practical politics: ‘He hath showed strength with his arm.  He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.  He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away’.  Isn't that just what is needed today?

            

Week 7.10

Tendring Topics……….on Line

Saving the Naze?

‘Crumbling cliffs and tower saved’, announced a headline in the Clacton Gazette on 11th February. It related, of course, to Walton’s crumbling Naze cliffs which recede year by year. A silent witness to the progress of the erosion is the concrete defensive ‘pillbox’ now yards from the foot of the cliffs. This had been built on the cliff-top as part of Britain’s defences against invasion during World War II

The news story below the headline made it clear that the salvation of the cliffs and Naze Tower, a Grade II Listed Building and a well-known local landmark, hadn’t yet occurred. Moreover the work to be undertaken will, in fact, protect only a 110-metre stretch of the cliff immediately in front of the Tower.

The work referred to is the creation of a ‘Crag Walk’, a tourist attraction and educational project that will include a rock revetment to protect the foot of the eroding cliffs and a new walkway that will incorporate a viewing platform from which the fossil-rich red crag cliffs can be inspected. The project will cost £1.2 million and the Gazette’s report follows the news that a grant of £500,000 from Essex County Council will bring the funding to that figure. Tendring District Council have contributed £520,000 from a £1 million grant in connection with the Government’s Coastal Pathfinder scheme and the Naze Protection Society has itself raised £230,000.

I have no doubt that it is a worthwhile scheme but it surely hardly deserves quite the enthusiastic reception it is receiving from Naze Protection supporters. It does not protect the whole of the Naze and it will only temporarily (though perhaps for a number of years) protect any part of it. A truly long-term solution can only be found by dealing with the seepage of rainwater through the subsoil and the stratum of permeable red crag, to the clay bed below it. This currently flows over the surface of that clay to escape at the foot of the cliff. It thus makes the crag above it unstable. The surface of the cliff crumbles and falls – and the sea washes the debris away.

In the very first years of Tendring Council’s existence following the reorganisation of 1974, the Council’s Engineer and Surveyor’s Department worked out a solution to this problem. This was the subject of a Public Enquiry. The Government inspector approved the scheme which was then shelved because of ‘lack of funds’. I pointed this out in my very first Tendring Topics in print, in 1980.

When the Crag Walk Project is completed the cliffs each side of the project will continue to erode. The protected section of the Naze will become a salient under constant threat from the sea. Eventually, possibly after many years, the sea will win. As King Canute demonstrated to his flattering courtiers a thousand years ago, no man can halt the flow of time or tide.

Not quite ‘proportional representation’ – but very welcome!

The passage through the House of Commons of the very first step towards a much-needed reform of our electoral system hasn’t attracted a great deal of attention from the national press – possibly because, with a general election only weeks away, it is quite likely that it will come to nothing.

At the moment we have a ‘first past the post’ voting system. The candidate who gets the greatest number of votes is elected. This is fine when there are just two candidates. However, when there are a number of them (as there often are these days) it is quite possible for the candidate elected under this system to have less than half the total votes cast. This means that, whoever else electors may have wanted, the majority of them didn’t want the candidate who has been declared the winner!

Under this system it is also quite possible, and has happened twice in recent years, for the Party that secures the most parliamentary seats, and therefore forms the government, not to be the one that secures the greatest number of votes throughout the whole country.

What is proposed is an ‘alternative vote’. Ballot papers would be exactly the same as at present but voters would be able to express their preference by putting 1, 2 or 3, indicating first, second and third choice against the candidates names.

When the votes are counted, the ‘first choices’ are first counted. If more than fifty percent of those who voted made any one of the candidates their first choice, then that is the end of the matter. That candidate is elected. If no-one has secured more than half of the ‘first choices’, then the second choices are counted and added to the ‘first choice’ totals. This will almost certainly produce a candidate with more than fifty percent of the vote. If it does not, then the ‘third choices’ can also be counted and added to the total. The candidate with more than fifty percent of the total votes counted will then be declared the winner.

This isn’t true ‘proportional representation’. It would still be possible for a party of government to have less than half the total vote. It would mean though that individual members of parliament couldn’t be elected on a minority vote and, unlike some forms of truly proportional representation, it would mean that those electors who chose to do so, could vote for the candidate rather than his or her party.

Gordon Brown’s opponents say that he has put the suggestion forward now ‘for political reasons’. It might make people who were wavering between Labour and Liberal Democrat, vote Labour. If there were to be a ‘hung parliament’ after the election it might persuade the Lib. Dems. to form a coalition with Labour rather than with the Conservatives.

Of course Mr Brown has put the idea forward for ‘political reasons’. That’s what politicians do. That doesn’t mean that it is a bad idea though. I think that, in the interest of democracy, it is a good, if not the very best, solution

The proposal that has successfully survived its first reading in the House of Commons is not that such a system should be introduced, but that the idea of its introduction should be presented to the electorate in a referendum.

Those who think that having a strong and decisive government is more important than having a truly representative one, would no doubt vote NO in such a referendum. Me? The reigns of Mrs Margaret Thatcher and of Mr Tony Blair have taken away my appetite for strong government. I would vote YES.

Fencing off the sea!

I’m not surprised that residents in Brightlingsea are up in arms at Tendring Council’s fencing off part of Brightlingsea’s promenade for health and safety reasons. I am glad that the Council has decided to have second thoughts about it.

It is said that a fatality that occurred some years ago when an elderly woman’s mobility scooter rolled over the edge on a seafront path in Holland-on-Sea, is one of the factors that have led to this fencing. Gordon Beare, founder and organiser of the Tendring Pensioners’ Action Group is a mobility scooter user himself. He is reported as saying he believed that railings were a good idea. ‘Many elderly people can have simple accidents on their scooters, so anything that will make sure a scooter can’t go into the water is a good idea’. Well, I too use a mobility scooter and wouldn’t wish to be without it. It could be dangerous, even fatal, to drive too close to the kerb (the pavement edge) of the footpath of a busy street. I think that most of us are wise and careful enough to keep away from the edge of the promenade.

A year or two ago, I watched a family disembarking from their car on the Naze at Walton and preparing for a picnic. The adults failed to notice that a two or three year old toddler, rejoicing in his freedom from adult attention, was making a beeline for the cliff top. Fortunately an onlooker spotted the child’s danger, intercepted him and brought him back to his parents. Instead of apologising for their own lack of attention their reaction was, ‘You’d really think that they’d have those cliffs fenced off!’

Where will it end? Ought we perhaps to erect fences along our beaches just above high tide mark because someone might wander into the sea and drown?

I don’t blame local authorities, or even the Health and Safety Executive for this absurd determination to make every human activity totally risk-free. Responsibility lies with our own ‘compensation culture’, the idea that every single mishap is ‘somebody’s fault’ and that ‘somebody’ must be made to pay!

It is a culture that is nourished and perpetuated by the ‘ambulance chasing, no-win, no-fee, lawyers’, whose adverts holding the promise of hundreds or thousands of pounds of compensation, help to keep commercial daytime tv on its feet!

A Fateful Anniversary

I am writing these words on St. Valentine’s Day. It is the sixty-fifth anniversary of my learning of an event that has affected me for the remainder of my life. At first it reinforced the Agnosticism that I held at that time. Three years later though it was one of the factors that led my wife and I to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The date was 14th February 1945. It was then that I learned of the horrifying firebomb raids on the city of Dresden, that had been carried out by the RAF during the night, and that the U.S. Air Force was continuing throughout that day.

I was a British prisoner of war at a working camp in Zittau, a small German town situated some sixty miles east of Dresden at the point where today the German, Czech and Polish frontiers coincide. Throughout the bitterly cold winter of 1944/’45, we had heard the sound of gunfire in the east increase from a distant murmur to a continuous and ever louder rumble.

By early February (after the failure of the last-ditch German winter offensive in the Ardennes) everyone in Zittau – we, our guards, the many foreign ‘slave workers’, and the German population knew that the war would be over in months, if not weeks.

The trickle of refugees fleeing before the inexorably advancing Soviet Army had grown to a flood. There were old men (younger ones had all been called up into the army), women and children, some babes in arms. Most were, of course, Germans but there were among them allied prisoners of war on a forced march away from the front line and possible liberation. There were Russian, Ukrainian and Polish ‘slave workers’, and there were abject and defeated units of Nazi Germany’s allies, Hungarians Bulgarians, and renegade Cossacks. Some had all their worldly goods piled onto ox-drawn carts, a few had lorries driven by ‘Holzgas’ (a gas – carbon monoxide perhaps? – produced by the slow and partial combustion of wood chippings). Many just trudged through the snow with their belongings on their backs or piled into small hand-carts.

They were heading for Dresden where the German Red Cross would take charge and distribute them among the few remaining parts of Germany that were relatively ‘safe’. By the 13th February some 300,000 refugees were crowded into the city.

That was the night that the RAF struck, creating firestorms that flattened fifteen square miles of the centre of Dresden and killed an estimated 25,000 people, overwhelmingly civilian, and many of them women and children. The grandfather of one of my current friends in Zittau was among the victims. He was a frail old man who escaped the flames to spend a bitterly cold February night in the open. He wouldn’t have counted as a casualty of the raid as he died a week later, of pneumonia!

In justification of the raid it has been claimed that no-one could be sure the war was nearly over, and that Dresden was a legitimate target as it contained factories supporting the Nazi war effort. It was also an important communications centre. However factories, a large railway station and an important river bridge, on the outskirts of the town were left unscathed while the bombers concentrated on the heavily populated city centre.

I have no doubt that the raids on Dresden were totally unjustified acts of terror which, had they been perpetrated by our opponents, would have been regarded as war crimes. Could they perhaps, have been an early gambit in the Cold War, carried out to impress the Soviet Army, which we knew would be there within weeks, with the strength of British and American Air Power?

‘The Nazis did worse things’. I know they did. Is that really an excuse for us?