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2004 - 2007
Why this blog?
Until this moment I have been forced to listen while media and politicians alike have told me "what Canadians think". In all that time they never once asked.
This is just the voice of an ordinary Canadian yelling back at the radio -
"You don't speak for me."
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My grandfather watched the Coventry Blitz. He was a truck driver; several trucks were near to entering the city when the bombing started. They switched off their lights so as not to present targets.
I wondered how it was that that town became such a dump.
Yeah but look what we did to Dresden! Tit for tat.
The leftist Socialists are still tearing the UK apart, simply from within now instead of from above.
My wife’s grandfather was an air raid warden in Yorkshire during the Blitz; he was one of those guys who went around and yelled at people for having lights on.
My father-in-law was just recently telling me that Germans conducted a two-week bombing of the London docks, setting them ablaze so that the city could easily be targeted. He said the Brits took that idea and used it on Dresden.
The movie Hope and Glory is an entertaining take on a child’s perspective of the Blitz.
American Liberalism took care of American manufacturing every bit as well as the German Socialist Party did of Coventry, Detroit is the poster child.
My cousins in Ruddington, Nottingham took my parents & me & my sister to see Coventry Cathedral yrs ago When we went to England & Scotland on a trip to visit family.
I can recall the ruins of the Cathedral And in the rebuilt church a Canadian conection. I can recall the Canadian Maple Leaf symbol in a section of the floor. I think it was as a thankyou to Canada for help in rebuilding after the war.
please someone correct me if iam wrong But i do recall the Maple Leaf, This was back in 1972 when we visited & i was 16 yrs old So quite awhile ago.
Tim in Vermont must be making a point, but it isn’t penetrating this 83 yr old brain.
Neither is Dick’s tit-for-tat.
God, there are times you read comments on this award winning blog and weep.
As a survivor of more than a few Blitz Raids in London, I can attest to the fact that those are really scary videos. I probably won’t sleep well tonight.
Well, war is war. We gave it back to the Germans, in spades. Coventry (and London) were badly hit,
but they did’t suffer firestorms as did Hamburg and Dresden, and later the Japanese cities.
War is all Hell, as Sherman said on several occasions.
Many Anglican cathedrals have a Coventry cross, nails formed into a cross, taken from the ruins of the cathedral in Coventry. Christ’s Church Cathedral in Hamilton has one, I remember hearing the stories about Coventry when I was a kid.
What does any of this have to do with leftist Socialists or Detroit?
And for the record, the bombing of Coventry was a war crime, the bombing of Dresden was not.
“… God, there are times you read comments on this award winning blog and weep.”
Indeed … but please don’t give up, sir!
Stange how victims of bombing raids on either side find common ground in their survival.
“Despite its location in the Soviet occupation (the Deutsche Demokratische Republik), in 1956 Dresden entered a twin-town relationship with Coventry. As a centre of military and munitions production, Coventry suffered some of the worst attacks on any English city at the hands of the Luftwaffe during the Coventry Blitzes of 1940 and 1941, which killed over 1,200 civilians and destroyed its cathedral”.
This defiant reaction to the Coventry Blitz has been well researched and studied.
In fact, objectively the startegic value of startegic bombing was seriously questioned prior to VJ day.
Germany’s war industry responded in a similar fashion to Britain’s under heavy bombing….it was objectively realized prior to VJ day that the main deciding factor was the tactical bombing of Germany’s transport infrastructure that prevented delivery of the means to Germany’s armies more than the destruction of the means of production by strategic bombing.
Only the apocaliptical devestation of nuclear weapons preserves any objective justification for strategic bombing…..
Tain’t right, tain’t wrong,…just is……..
@ TheDiggler
The winners always decide what is a war crime. If the other side had won you can be sure Dresden would have been a war crime and “Mad bomber Harris” would have been hung. The nature of war.
Sorry, when I stopped by Coventry to catch a train, and I had vision of a beautiful Medieval city, preserved, maybe something like Bath, maybe based on the Coventry Carol, IDK, but the place is a dump. Inside the ring road, forget about it. You don’t want to walk around that town at night.
I remember driving through Kenilworth, which is a small town just outside Coventry. I lived quite near there when I was in the army and posted there. Anyway, in Kenilworth there is a street with beautiful medieval buildings on one side of the street and the worst form of 1950’s strip mall on the other. It was the victim of a bomber that didn’t quite make it to Coventry.
“… God, there are times you read comments on this award winning blog and weep.”
I agree, and concur with michael st. paul’s comment to the effect that “don’t give it up sir”.
And I take offence to gratuitous comments such as “tit for tat”…this wasn’t a computer game Dick, these were real people, experiencing real bombs, and real tragedies. I’m sure Dick, that you probably did not mean to give offence when you posted that…but nonetheless…you did.
My family lost pretty much everything in the war, and without going into specifics, lost a number of family members as a result of the war as well. To me the war is not an abstract, it is something that has affected and shaped my entire life.
And peterj, you may be right “Bomber Harris” (I object to the pejorative “Mad”) would assuredly have been hung, as well as most of the UK military establishment, and civilian establishment, as well as members perhaps of my familiy and yours. That was the nature of the loathsome disease embodied by the Nazis.
But your point was????
@ Bruce
My point was simply that we can count our blessings that we won. There were times it could have gone the other way. I wonder how many people understand what the repercussions of that would have been. Especially the younger generations.
“Mad” bomber Harris was a title given to him by his peers.
Robert’s “more here” from Wiki is interesting and is further to some information in an Athabaska University course on propaganda I took about 1990.
The common view is that Hitler initiated the practice of bombing civilian targets. The course material taught that the British Bomber Command bombed four German cities and this deflected Hitler from continuing the attack on the British air fields and to retaliate in like manner. The thinking in some quarters is that if the Luftwaffe had continued the attacks against the British air fields the RAF would have been crippled. Interesting. He said, she said.
Churchill was right, the Battle of Britain was Britain’s finest hour during that century. Unfortunately things do not look too promising for the future. Socialism has sapped the moral fiber of the nation.
his superiors called him “bomber” ie Churchill
his peers called him “Bert”
his statue in Trafalgar square doesnt say “mad”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDtq7z6w0dE
Don’t forget the nazi attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, Lyon, etc.
They earned Hamburg, Berlin and so on.
Of course it would have been better if they could have nuked Schweinfurt, even Dachau and so on, and ended it quicker. More’s the pity.
@ cal2
My fault but there seems to be a misunderstanding on the “mad” part. It was never derogatory but rather a title given to Harris when he was CO of the 45 squadren flying a sopwith Camel in 1917 over France and the chances he took trying to drop bombs on certain german installations. He took chances that his fellow airmen considered mad. Paid off though as he was also credited with five enemy aircraft kills. Some of the pilots he had served with followed him into WW2 and the name stuck in a casual manner. It was mentioned in either “Bomber Offensive” by Arthur Harris or the book “Bomber Barons”.
Interesting I just finished building a 1/32 scale model of a Heinkel He 111 P-1. The bomber used in the bombing of Coventry.
I read the Wikipedia entry on Coventry Blitz and am a little bit upset. Just for example, how should we understand the following sentence:
“The British used the opportunity given them by the attack on Coventry to try a new tactic against Germany.” ??
Also, it portraits Coventry as some military industrial power house (hence legitimate target).
Tom B.
@ Tom
Ok , I’ll bite
The new tactic was carpet bombing rather than precision bombing which Harris considered ineffective with the technology at the time. Kill lots of civilians and destroy as much of their housing and infrastructure as possible to demoralize the public. The debate is still warm as to whether his methods were effectine in shortening the war but I lean on the “it was” side.
Coventry did have many military targets in and around it but remember we are talking about night bombing in both cases which at the time was anything but accurate. Coventry lost approx. 1200 civilians and recovered quickly on the military end.
Dresden lost approx. 25000 and lost very little on the military side as there was little there.
I have a book that speculates that Churchill sent the RAF to bomb Berlin so they would retaliate against London and layoff the airfields where they were on the verge of winning the Battle of Britain. Described as a war winning masterstroke there is no support offered for this course of action being intentional. London had been bombed during the BB before.
If Coventry before the war was as beautiful as Kenilworth, then what a loss. I never thought of it that way, I was just shocked by what a dump it was when I had a vision of probably, what was there before.
@ tim in vermont
Bet that would appply to a great many places. Been to Detroit lately ??
Last time I was at Detroit was just a layover, but the aircraft had to abort the landing due to coyotes on the runway.