With or Without Comment (1943)

From the October 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Holy Russia

As it was 20 years ago : —

“There is full religious toleration, but the communist party is fiercely anti-clerical and conducts an unremitting controversy with the orthodox church— certainly the most reactionary and grossly superstitious form of belief that survives in the civilised world.— (“The Russian Workers’ Republic.” H. N. Brailsford. Published about 1921. P. 150.)

As it is to-day : —

“A nation-wide programme of church repair and reconstruction has been started in the Soviet Union. 

Archbishop Sergei, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the chairman of the Moscow Soviet have visited the new Virgin Monastery in Moscow to inspect damage done. 

Soviet architects are preparing blue-prints of a model type of village church to be erected in place of the  hundreds burned down by the Germans. Work is also going on on plans for restoring to the smallest detail the famous Istra Monastery, which was badly damaged by the Germans in 1941.”—(Reuter, Moscow, March 11. Manchester Guardian, March 13, 1943.)

“Marshal Stalin on Saturday officially received, in his capacity as Soviet Premier, the acting Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Sergei of Moscow, Metropolitan Alexis of Leningrad, and Metropolitan Nikolai of Kiev. In the course of the conversations Metropolitan Sergei informed Stalin and Molotov . . . that the Church leaders intended shortly to call an assembly of Orthodox bishops to elect a Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, and to set up a Holy Synod, or Church Council, under the Patriarch. Stalin, as head of the Government, received this information sympathetically and declared that the Government would have no objection.—(Daily Worker, September 6, 1943.)

Mr. Alexander Werth, Moscow Correspondent of the Sunday Times (August 22) suggests that one of the reasons for the favour now shown to the Church by the Russian Government is the desire to increase the birth rate.

Another obvious explanation of the change is that now the Communist International has been formally disbanded the Orthodox Church will serve as a useful means by which Russian foreign policy can exercise influence in those Balkan countries where the Orthodox Church is strong. The Times cautiously remarks that it is better that Russian interest should be expressed through the Church than through Communist channels.— (Times, September 17.)

“The Archbishop of York, 68-years-old Dr. Garbett, travelled to Russia . . . with two small suitcases—one held his ordinary clothes, the other his ceremonial robes, vestments in cloth of gold and the gold-lined mitre.”— (Daily Mail, September 16, 1943.)

Was this journey really necessary?

“We greet you, we salute you, we thank you, we remember you in our prayers, and we say God bless and God guide the people of Russia and their great leader, Joseph Stalin.— (Bishop of Chelmsford; who said also that Christians in Russia form “a far larger number and percentage of the general population than is the case in this country.” Daily Telegraph, June 28, 1943.)

* * * *

An Excellent Precedent

“Mussolini, trying to assert himself in his old blustering manner, complained of the lack of light and running water when he was imprisoned on Ponzi Island, according to neutral travellers reaching Madrid from Rome to-day.

He did not complain for long. According to one account (quoted by British United Press). Mussolini was told by the prison warden :

‘This prison was built on plans signed and approved by yourself. Thousands of your political prisoners have been lodged here—and you are the first to complain.'”—(Evening Standard, August 26, 1943.)

When shall we see Ministers of Health living in “workers'” houses, food millionaires living on the food they sell, Ministers of Labour labouring at the wages they fix?

* * * *

Morals and 1,000,000 Slum Dwellings

“You cannot expect cleanliness, truth and honesty from people brought up in houses which are damp, verminous and without sanitary decency. There must be a million such houses in this country. Sexual morality fails when there is deplorable overcrowding in filthy houses. 

For 50 years after the present war we shall be struggling to regain the moral and social level which our people reached at the end of the Victorian era. The Church can give invaluable service in this task, but we must show a wisdom bred of wide understanding and sympathy.”—(Dr. Barnes, Bishop of Birmingham (reported in Daily Telegraph, May 27, 1943.)

* * * *

A Reform Which Didn’t Reform

A Companies Act was passed in 1928 to remedy abuses of the law governing companies. In 1929 the 1928 Act and all other existing Companies legislation was consolidated in the Companies Act, 1929.

Its sponsors said it was a very good act. It was based on the report “of a very able Committee” (President of the Board of Trade, House of Commons, February 21, 1928). “The House,” he said, “owes a real debt of gratitude to the members of that Committee.” On April 29, 1929, he said that the Consolidated Act was “a perfect piece of consolidation,” and that a tribute was due to the Parliamentary draftsmen for their work.

It might have been supposed that such a well-favoured Act, running to 385 Sections and 12 Schedules, could be regarded as the last word on the subject; but now the Government has appointed a new committee to inquire into the matter all over again. The Manchester Guardian explains the new inquiry thus : —

“This new review … is dictated, first, by evasive practices (some plainly criminal) which have developed in recent years and, by changes that have taken place in the same period in the industrial and commercial practice of the country. The ‘shameful swindling’ of the inventor (as an authoritative voice called it) by ingenious rogues acting barely within the terms of the 1929 Act is perhaps the principal motive behind the new inquiry.”—(Manchester Guardian, June 30, 1943.)

In short, the ingenious rogues soon found new legal ways of “driving a coach and four” through the 1929 Act; and the Times is sceptical whether the new inquiry will do anything better : —

“Unless the present Committee are extraordinarily successful in interpreting the current of public opinion (as well as in remedying past and present abuses) and in picturing the future form of organisation of industry, the Companies Act of their amending, like the Act of 1929, will itself be wanting amending long before the 1950’s or 1960’s.”—(Times, July 5, 1943.)

It is interesting to record an observation made by the President of the Board of Trade at the time of the 1928 Act. He scouted the idea “that frauds and lesser malpractices can be stopped by the simple expedient of a prohibition by Act of Parliament” (House of Commons, February 21, 1928) and went on to make the illuminating remark that “the imposition of statutory regulations and prohibitions might not merely put a stop to the activities of a wrong-doer but place quite intolerable fetters upon honest business.” It was better in some cases, he said, to refrain from action “because it might be of doubtful advantage and might gravely interfere with the necessary elasticity of business.”

How long will it be before the new Act is shot through like the old one?

* * * *

News About the Next War

A short while ago a Royal Air Force officer said that whether bombing won this war or not, it would certainly win the next war. I doubt if Sir Arthur Harris would agree.

“It appears to me that bombing should be regarded in the framework of military history. No two major wars are dominated by the same weapon. The war of 1914-18 was a submarine war It was very nearly won by submarines. The Germans thought that the following war would be a submarine war; but it has turned out to be a bomber war. That, in itself, implies that the next war will not be a bomber war, but a war dominated by some new weapon, perhaps some form of radio weapon.”—(Major Oliver Stewart, Evening Standard, September 1, 1943.)

“. . . Having had two wars in one lifetime, we are naturally running the second war rather better, very much better, than we did the first. If we have a third war in our lifetime—and I hope we shall not—we shall run that war with almost complete perfection, in the light of this second experience.”—(Mr. Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary, House of Commons, May 26, 1943.)

* * * *

Russia Abandons Educational Experiments

Admirers of Soviet Russia used to make much of their educational methods, co-education, self-government, free secondary education, and so on. One by one these have been abandoned. The following summary is from the Economist (August 28, 1943) :—

“The new school year in Russia starts with a sensational reform. The co-education of boys and girls in secondary schools has been prohibited. . . . The reform is to be enforced with the utmost determination. . . . No reasons have been, given officially to explain this step, which marks a significant departure from Soviet pedagogical principles. Co-education was until recently regarded as one of the progressive features in which Soviet schools took a particular pride. The reform is, no doubt, in keeping with the reforms carried out a few years before the war, which brought the Russian school back to its more or less traditional path. The so-called self-government of school children was then abolished; the authority of the teacher was re-established; uniforms for school children, as well as formal examinations, were re-introduced; and last, but not least, fees were introduced for secondary schools attendance.”

Alexander Werth, Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times, reports (August 22, 1943) that a Russian paper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, in a recent article, emphasised that “boys must train to be soldiers and technicians. . . . The essential function of girls—who among other things will in the schools receive special training in sewing, hygiene, and cooking—’is to become future mothers.’ ”

Mr. Werth goes on :—.

“In youth organisations today the idea of authority of parents and teachers is being strongly inculcated. The enormous losses suffered in the war . . . coming on top of the various errors in the past, such as the abortion laws, which were not repealed until 1936, have unquestionably prompted the Government to adopt a long-term population and birth-rate policy with a return to strong family principles. In this connection it is interesting to observe the encouragement given to the Churches, especially in rural areas.”— (Sunday Times, August 22, 1943.)

* * * *

Comrades in Arms?

” Nowadays privates and N.C.O.s travelling in a bus, tube or train, must give up their seats to men of senior rank should they be standing.”—(From an article on New Regulations in the Russian Army, Daily Worker, July 9, 1943.)

“There is a very great division indeed between rates of pay for officers and men of the Red Army. The men get 10 roubles a month. That is about 6d. of my money. An officer of field rank on active service in the line earns up to three or four thousand roubles a month.”—(Paul Holt, Moscow Correspondent of Daily Express, May 24, 1943.)

* * * *

The Vatican and its Money

The Daily Express (September 4, 1943) reported the arrival in London of a Signor Fummi who is “an important banker in Italy, and advises the Pope on financial matters. The Vatican State is probably by far the richest for its size in the world and its finances are spread in almost every country. The Pope takes a personal interest in the various investments and sees that the resources of the Papacy are carefully nursed. Recently he sent a representative to America to look into investments there, and Signor Fummi will spend some time with Bank of England and other financial experts going into the considerable Vatican finances invested here.”

Forward (September 11, 1943) quotes the following from The Week : —

“What may prove a new factor of international importance is disclosed in news reaching us from an unimpeachable New York source to the effect that the Vatican account has now been effectively concentrated in the hands of the Morgan Bank. And it is stated the account is … probably among the three largest single accounts now handled by the House of Morgan. The account, it appears, by no means represents merely the gigantic Vatican funds raised in the United States, but on the contrary is to a considerable extent composed of moneys raised in Europe and transferred to New York.”

Edgar Hardcastle

Syria: Bashar Lives Up to His Name (2012)

From the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anybody can claim to be an opponent of the present Syrian government, but what kind of a regime is it proposed to establish in its place?

They have been calling it “the Arab Spring”. Various dictators around the Mediterranean have been overthrown, and successor regimes, more or less distinct from the ones that went before, have been installed. Tunisia’s dictator was thrown out first, to be followed by the dictators of Egypt, Libya, and the Yemen. Now there is a more or less open rebellion in Syria, aimed at overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, the local despot.

The lands stretching across from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf were among the earliest areas to develop what is often called “civilization” – that is, human beings living en masse in larger and larger cities. The Syrian city of Aleppo, for example, has been continuously inhabited for at least five thousand years, and Damascus probably for nearly as long. Several religions trace their origins to this part of the world. Fervent believers in the book of Genesis have often speculated that the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the talkative serpent, and the extremely fertile tree which produced “knowledge” as well as apples were located somewhere in the vicinity. This move to city-dwelling was the result of the spread of the idea of private property, where the land and trading concerns, and anything else which produced wealth, belonged to a small upper class, while the rest of the population, virtually propertyless, worked for the benefit of this group of owners.

Separate states came into being, each ruled by a group of owners. Inevitably, violence became common as people tried to seize economic and political power for themselves within a state, and as each state tried to impose its power on neighbouring states. And so the human race began to know organized warfare. As societies based on private property became more common there was more strife and more violence, and the lands to the east of the Mediterranean became the scene of repeated conflicts. Surrounded by great land masses – Asia to the east, Africa to the south-west, and Europe to the north-west – invading forces came repeatedly from all directions; great armies murdered, looted, raped, and destroyed; empires rose and fell. The result was a great hotchpotch of peoples, each believing themselves to be racially different from those around them, and having different and hostile religious beliefs and loyalties.

Imperialist carve-up

A hundred years ago, this area was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by Turkey. Then came the First World War of 1914-18, which the allied powers claimed was to protect the rights of small nations, but which turned out in the end (as you might have expected) to be more about extending the rights of big nations – or the rulers of those nations, at any rate. The Ottoman Empire was on the losing side in that war, and so was carved up at the end of it for the benefit of the victors. The lands between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf were shared between two of the victorious Allies, Britain and France. Britain got (for example) a stretch of territory which it divided up into three separate states, Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine; and France divided up its share into Syria and Lebanon – the latter was kept separate because it seemed it might well have a Catholic majority (like France).

After the share-out at the Treaty of Versailles, both Britain and France had to deal with rebellions in the newly acquired territories. Iraqis who objected to the British take-over were bombed into submission. One Arthur Harris was a young squadron-leader there.  He had found how effective (and risk-free) it was to bomb obnoxious tribesmen on the North-West Frontier in India, and now he did the same in Iraq, helped by the fact that the rebellious Iraqis had no aircraft or anti-aircraft defences. The young airman is supposed to have said, “the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand.”

Bomber Harris was able to put these lessons to good use in the Second World War when he organized the carpet bombing of working-class areas in German cities – that was where the factory workers lived; the houses were smaller and closer together, and of course bombing richer areas would not kill or injure so many of the people who actually did the work. The French had the same problems in Syria as the British did in Iraq; Syria saw a widespread revolt in 1925-7. Fortunately the French were able to bring in troops with much better modern armaments against the lightly armed Syrians, so they were able to establish their superiority.

Coups and counter-coups

Then came the Second World War, which revealed that both Britain and France had now fallen into the ranks of second-class powers, and neither was able to keep up its colonial empire. Iraq became independent, and so did Syria. The prize of forming the government of Syria and ruling it on behalf of its native upper class was vigorously contested. Coups and counter-coups were constant: in the ten years between 1946 and 1956 there were twenty different governments and four newly-drafted constitutions. The same story of violent take-overs continued, even including a “union” with Egypt in 1958, which fell apart in 1961. But such regular upheavals are not good for business; and in 1963 the so-called “Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party” took over. It was not Socialist at all, of course; it had a programme under which the state would run industries and would enforce stability without bothering too much about free speech and so forth.

For a time the fighting for office continued, but now the hostilities were between factions within the Ba’ath Party. A new group seized power in 1966. One of the successful plotters, Hafez al-Assad, became Minister for Defence. After four years and a final capture of authority: Hafez al-Assad became President, and, in fact, dictator. (The two leading members of the former government went to jail.) Hafez was an Alawite, that is, a member of a Shia Muslim sect, and before long Alawites were put in positions of control in the army and in every government body. This was particularly necessary, because most Muslims in Syria are Sunnis, and many Sunnis regard the Alawites as heretics. Any opposition was dealt with as every dictator deals with it: imprisonment, torture, death. Hafez is accused of carrying out thousands of extra-judicial killings. An attempted assassination in 1980 failed: the machine-gun missed. Within hours, 1,200 Islamists held in jail had been slaughtered in their cells at Tadmor Prison by armed groups led by Rifaat al-Assad, the dictator’s brother. But after the confusion and uncertainty of the previous decades most of the Syrian upper class was happy to go along with the new regime. As for the ordinary Syrians, with Hafez, now in control of the newspapers, the radio, and every other means of information, was able to create a nationwide feeling that stability was better than the disorder and constant shifts of the past and began building up his own personality cult. As the Russians had been propagandized into supporting Stalin and the Germans brainwashed into supporting Hitler, so the Syrians were now conned into supporting Hafez.

There was still trouble from some malcontents, especially from those who fancied becoming the rulers themselves. In 1982 there was an insurrection in the city of Hama led by the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted to establish a stricter form of Islam. Hafez ordered the troops in – picked formations commanded by his brother Rifaat – who bombarded Hama, destroying much of the old city and killing (estimates differ) between 15,000 and 40,000 Syrians, nearly all civilians. Rifaat, it seems, later boasted that he had killed 38,000 people in Hama. Two years afterwards Rifaat tried a coup of his own, aiming to replace his brother; it failed, and Rifaat now lives in exile in London. But being the brother of the dictator he had been able to assemble extensive business interests, and he now lives in some comfort in a ten million pound mansion off Park Lane. If you kill one person you will probably end up in jail; but killing thousands seems to have fewer repercussions.

Hereditary despot

Like many dictators, Hafez wanted to be the boss even after he was dead. He had several sons, and the eldest, Bassel, was groomed to succeed him. His second son, Bashar, was allowed to go his own way, and he became a doctor. In 1992 he came to England and studied to become an ophthalmologist – an eye specialist. Then in 1994 Bassel was killed in a car crash. Without asking the Syrians or (apparently) even his own family Hafez now decided that Bashar would have to be the next strong man. And when Hafez died in 2000 the tame Syrian parliament that had previously passed an Act to say the President had to be at least 40 now hurriedly passed another Act to say that he had to be at least 34, which, by great good luck, was exactly Bashar’s age. So Bashar was promoted to field-marshal, which is a rank not many eye doctors have reached, and took over as dictator. There was a “vote”, of course, in which Bashar was the only candidate, and it was announced that 97.3 percent of the Syrians had voted for him. (An improbable result: in our discordant society it is unlikely that 97 percent of voters would agree what day of the week it was). He ruled for seven years, and then another “vote” was held.  This time the officials in charge thought it would be a good idea to claim an even better result, so they said that 97.6 percent had supported the dictator.

Bashar has proved to be a chip off the old block: dissent is dealt with by torture, imprisonment, and death. When early in 2011 a big demonstration was held against his rule, the demonstrators were chased away by the security forces. The regime announced first that there had been no demonstration, and second that there had been a demonstration in favour of Bashar. Protests continued in many towns and cities across the country; soldiers began deserting and taking their guns with them.  Now Syria appears to be on the brink of civil war, with the army moving in to kill any who oppose Bashar and bringing up artillery to pound any supposedly disloyal areas. Districts regained by government forces are decorated with corpses, either with their throats cut or decapitated. Some estimates of the dead put the total as high as 8,000. Many other countries have decided that Bashar cannot survive and regularly issue statements deploring Bashar’s excesses, though Russia and China, in both of which democracy is a rude word, cannot apparently see anything wrong with Bashar’s dictatorship. It is curious to hear the American government, rulers of a country which killed at least 100,000 Iraqis (many think the death toll was at least half a million, or even a million) claiming how shocked they are by a death toll so much smaller than the one they have achieved.

Some people in Syria still support Bashar. They include Alawites, since the privileged position they have held since Hafez took power may provoke revenge if Bashar falls; the Druze, an unorthodox Muslim sect; and the Christians of half a dozen different denominations. All of them fear that if Bashar is succeeded by a Sunni government extreme Islamists may persecute minorities. And, of course, Bashar’s close friends and relatives back him to the hilt.  Bashar’s wife is called Asma. Her parents were Syrians living in London, and she was brought up in England.  And while Bashar’s trusted soldiers and militias polish up new ways to torture and murder the regime’s opponents, Asma has been ordering luxury goods from Paris, including a £10,000 consignment of chandeliers and silver candlesticks.  Why shouldn’t Bashar’s inner circle champion him?

The opponents of Bashar are from every point in the political spectrum, including some who, if they gained power, might well establish a regime compared with which Bashar would look like Little Bo Peep. Those who opposed Stalin included loathsome dictators like Hitler; those who opposed Hitler included loathsome dictators like Stalin. Anybody can claim, probably with absolute sincerity, to be a zealous opponent of the present Syrian Government; but a much more significant question is this – what kind of a regime is it proposed to establish in place of Bashar’s? There are those who think that if Bashar was killed out of hand like Gaddafi of Libya, or hanged like Saddam Hussein of Iraq, or put on trial like Mubarak of Egypt, or chased away into exile like Ben Ali of Tunisia, then democracy with free speech and free elections would miraculously appear fully formed. That may, to say the least, be over-optimistic. No one knows exactly what the future holds; but it is certain that at the present time anybody or any group replacing the present rulers of Syria will continue to run Syrian capitalism for the benefit of the Syrian capitalists, whatever cosmetic reforms they may think it necessary to make.

Alwyn Edgar

Something to Remember You By (2012)

From the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

It says a lot about the society we live in that there are so many war memorials. The latest addition to London's collection is to the men of RAF Bomber Command who were killed in operations over enemy territory during the 1939/45 war. Wait a minute; that war ended nearly seventy years ago. What took so long? Well to answer that we might do worse than think about Terry, who does not rate a place on a memorial because, although he flew in many of those operations he avoided being killed in them. Strip away his agonising dependence on alcohol and nicotine and you are left with Terry as a nice guy – gentle, caring, sociable. Restless, mind you, which may have been related to his comfortably-off family whose farming allowed them to plonk him into a posh nearby grammar school, but which infected him with an addiction to fast motor bikes and big, powerful goods lorries. And which then led to his partaking in a cruelly prolonged and deliberate act of mass destruction and killing.

Rear Gunner

At the time the gossip was that a desire to escape from his family drove Terry, when he was seventeen, to volunteer for Royal Air Force aircrew. Perhaps he dreamed of being a Spitfire pilot - Winston Churchill and The Few and all that. But he was forced to contain such energies when he was classified as a rear gunner - the coldest, most isolated, most dangerous position - in a squadron of Lancaster bombers. This aircraft was regarded as a marvel of speed, operating ceiling and bomb load, useful to the policy of what came to be known as area - saturation - bombing which emphatically laid waste to a number of great German cities and killed between 300,000 and 600,000 civilians. The casualties in Bomber Command exceeded 55,000 killed - one seventh of all British deaths in action during the course of the war. But the Lancaster offered its rear gunner one hopeful feature, for in an emergency he could use a mechanism to spin the turret so that the armoured doors he had entered through opened out at the tail end of the aircraft; he could then escape by tipping himself backwards and operating his parachute.

Coincidence And Cowardice

Terry contributed to the horror, as he recalled, by completing over sixty operations - well above the average or any expectation - which he survived through a combination of beneficial coincidences and cowardice. On one occasion, in terror while under attack, he used the aircraft Elsan and came back to his turret to find it had been blasted away. On another, soon after taking off and while still in English air space, he heard the pilot shouting that he could smell someone smoking; Terry heard only the word “smoke” so without asking any questions he spun his turret and threw himself out into the evening air. He could give a vivid account of dangling calmly from his parachute while watching the bomber continue on its way to the flak and night fighters. The most colourful incident was when the pilot found, after landing safely from an operation, that Terry had fallen asleep - which was strictly forbidden. He ordered the crew to leave Terry there while he took the aircraft out to the dispersal point at the remotest fringes of the airfield. When Terry eventually woke up his first, immediate sensation took in only the absence of vibration and engine noise so again he threw himself out – except that in this case he was only a few feet off the ground and had a long walk back to the airfield buildings, dragging an open parachute with him. In the years after the war he could laugh at these experiences but he could not laugh - could not even talk about - two incidents when his pilot could not get a badly damaged bomber back to base and crashed it into the sea, or another when his squadron came back to be told that they had seriously failed to hit their target and so must return at once to do it as ordered, flying in the daylight formation for which they had no training. Terry's dominating memory of that raid was of spotting another Lancaster alongside, in which he knew a close friend was the rear gunner. As he watched the bomber dissolved into a ball of fire.

Terrifying Force

By the time Terry was flying on operations, the effectiveness of RAF bombers, in terms of their range, power, technological equipment and bomb load, had been vastly improved. Which must also be said about the disciplined brutality of the raids. Now it was all controlled over the target by a designated Leader Marker who dropped a first flare. This was followed by the Pathfinders dropping aiming marker flares, which the main bomber force then used (once the Marker Leader was satisfied it had all been carried out accurately) to aim their bomb load onto the buildings and people below. And while this was happening the higher levels of command, where the policy was laid down, were involved in a long debate about the most effective – the most damaging and most murderous – method of wielding that terrifying force. Should it be against targets such as aircraft factories, oil plants, railways? Or should it be straightforwardly used against human beings, smashing their homes and all around them and killing as many as possible with the object of undermining their morale and affecting the German war effort. In the process of this argument a number of German cities - Berlin, Cologne, Essen and others - had to pay a savage price. A passionate devotee of the policy of area bombing was then at the head of the RAF Bomber Command - Air Marshall Arthur Harris (known, for obvious reasons, as “Bomber” Harris).  Air Marshall Harris persisted in the face of some influential opposition and attempts to sack him: “ . .  . in the last eighteen months Bomber Command has virtually destroyed forty-five out of the leading sixty German cities. There are not many industrial centres of population now left intact. Are we going to abandon this vast task, which the German themselves have long admitted to be their worst headache, just as it nears completion?” (1 November 1944). The rancour in this dispute over the most likely way to kill the largest number of the enemy was unusually enduring; Harris had to wait until 1953 for the government to award him a baronetcy, there was no campaign medal for the crews and only recently has there been that permanent memorial.

Hypocrisy

Against the odds Terry survived into civilian life, got married, had kids and was soon brought up against the fact that being one of yesterday's heroes - one of the glorious Bomber Boys - was not unfailingly attractive to employers. And then there was the ever-present need to control the more erratic features in his personality, which may have been acceptable up in the air above some burning German city but not so useful on the ground in peacetime. In bald terms, he and his family had a hard time of it. He split from his wife and was told that he suffered from an aggressive cancer in his lungs. In his last days in hospital he once blurted out that he “...could fight all those fucking Germans but I can't fight this.” At that time the ravaged cities were being re-built, the places of those who had died were being taken by others. And now, in a most blatant example of ruling-class hypocrisy, there is offered a monument to the men who died while they did their bit to make it happen. All of them were victims of the propaganda which insisted that there was an enemy who needed to be fought to exhaustion when in truth all of their interests were in unity. Terry was there because he accepted those lies – allowed them to wreck what should have been another useful life.

Ivan