… my way into the lean-to at the other side of the house. It was full of bricks and wood that I threw in there when I had a tidy-up a couple of years ago. The plan is to put my plant-pot beichstuhl on the inside to the left of the door, put all my gardening tools to the right, and fill up the rest with wood that I’ll be cutting through the winter and of course all of the scrap wood from the roof that is too bad to reuse. There’s tons of that.
It’s not quite working out like this though as the best-laid plans of mice, men and yours truly have a habit of going gang awa’, but at least I’m making slow progress.
If you have been following my website over the years you will maybe remember that it was into here that I was planning to move when the idea of coming here full-time was first discussed. But a casual survey of the roof showed that two of the beams had rotted and when I came to replace them it turned out that seven needed to be replaced and while I was taking some of them out part of the wall collapsed. And it was just after having rebuilt the wall that I was taken ill, and that was that.
In other news, following the collapse of the English-language newspaper, the SMADC – the French Government body charged with regenerating the Combrailles – has been looking at other ways to communicate with the English-speaking community over here and one idea currently being batted around is to have a 15-minute English-speaking spot every Sunday on the local radio station. They are looking for a radio presenter for the programme (if it goes ahead) and it seems that someone has thrown my hat into the ring.
In other other news, it’s been announced that a 90 year-old German is to be tried for a war crime dating back over 60 years. This follows the trial of an 88 year-old the other day. Can you imagine the scene in the court …
“How do you plead?”
“Not Guilty“
“What evidence do you have to disprove the accusations?”
“Well none, actually. The last of my defence witnesses died in 1972“
So what chance of a fair trial are these people going to get? It’s like the case of Demianjuk – even the Zionists found him Not Guilty of war crimes but he’s being hawked around country after country until someone can find a crime to pin on him. It’s a total disgrace.
These two guys are being tried for a handful of civilian deaths, yet night after night after night members of Bomber Command of the British Royal Air Farce flew over Germany deliberately targeting innocent civilians and massacred them by their hundreds of thousands. When is someone going to round them up and put them on trial for the horrific war crimes that they committed? And how many Russian soldiers were prosecuted for the atrocious war crimes that they committed against the German civilian population as they overran the Eastern provinces of Germany?
History is indeed written by the victors and never by the victims. Bah! Humbug!
How many of the Luftwaffe were prosecuted for bombing Coventry etc? None. You are trying to compare eggs and apples Eric. The ones being prosecuted are being done for crimes committed against the populace in occupied territory. The RAF and the Luftwaffe were waging war over enemy territory. While we may both disagree with the results of the bombings and the targets chosen, both sides were equally guilty of such atrocities and no-one can be proud of that. On the other hand both fought to defend their own people, often against overwhelming odds and they can be proud of that. I do disagree with continuing the hunt for war criminals because as you rightly say all hope of a fair trial is long gone. It’s time we (all nations) acknowledged that the risk of convicting the innocent outweighs the chance of catching the guilty and stopped these show trials.
Ahh but Coventry and almost everywhere that the Luftwaffe bombed were perfectly legitimate military targets where the aiming point was actually the military target concerned. It was the policy of the RAF – and the Lindemann “de-housing” paper proves this if nothing else does – to deliberately target the civilian population.
The German indiscriminate bombing was as a result of the “terror-flyers” of the RAF and the weapons that they used – flying bombs – were known as “V-weapons”, the “V” being for Vengeance.
And in fact, the commander of the Luftwaffe was tried for war crimes in respect of the bombing of Rotterdam but that incident, like the bombing of Guernica, was blown up (“groan” – ed) out of all proportion and paled into insignificance with what the British did to the civilians in Hamburg and Dresden, to name but two.
Rotterdam was bombed to destroy the dutch resistance to invasion in 1940. They specifically targeted civilian areas of the city. They also starved the Dutch as punishment for their resistance during 1944 cost 18,000 lives. But on the point of whether the Luftwaffe bombed indescriminately. It was their policy if driven off by ack-ack or the fighters of the RAF to unload their bombs on any village, structure or lighted area on their route home. That order is also well documented and it’s the reason we did’t have many windmills, historical sites or churches left undamaged at the end of the war. My home town was also bombed repeatedly and the only thing here was a castle. It wasn’t a military site or rail depot at the time. The local joke was they had a thing against rhubarb and liquorice and were trying to give the troops constipation :-).
The V bombs were developed because the RAF were driving the Luftwaffe bombers off before they could reach their targets. They were often spotted as they crossed the coast and planes were scrambled to meet them over open country.
The V bombs and incendiaries were terror weapons simply because their targets could not be predicted. They had limited fuel carrying capacity because of the weight so couldn’t carry much of a reserve. Their rate of fuel use depended on wind sheer, altitude, and a host of other variables and when the fuel short a trigger was activated causing the bomb to dive to earth… with predictable results. Documented figures showed that in a 12 month period the V-1 killed 22,892 civilians and destroyed 1,127,000 houses. The German military knew that and used them anyway.
The Nazi’s started a war to create a world the way they wanted it and were prepared to use any method to acheive it including murdering 100s of 1000s of their own people, shooting prisoners, starvation, massacres, eugenic ‘cleansing’ of the weak, sick, disabled or mentally ill, and ethnic cleansing in the concentration camps.
I don’t blame the German people as a whole for what the Nazi’s did, but neither do I accept that there weren’t deliberate atrocities ordered to frighten the British people into surrender. After all it worked with the Italians and the french. I’ve also no doubt that anger on both sides fueled retaliation throughout the war. It’s why wars are harder to stop than to start. There are no angels in war. That’s why war is always something to be avoid.
“….it’s the reason we did’t have many windmills, historical sites or churches left undamaged at the end of the war. My home town was also bombed repeatedly and the only thing here was a castle” – I had no idea that you were Dutch, Krys LOL.
But apart from that, the bombing of Rotterdam was to flatten the Durch forces at the north of the bridgehead over the Maas. I’m sure no-one disputes that as a genuine military aim.
And the Luftwaffe had long been driven off before the V-weapons were anything more than a dream. They were all in Russia. Prior to that, they had only been coming over individually at night since the glory nights of winter 1940 – the so-called “Baedecker raids”. And the idea that British nightfighters played a part in turning them back is … er … imaginative, to say the least.
As for the effectiveness of the V1s, £-for-£ they were certainly the most effective aerial weapon that has ever been invented and their descendants, the SCUD missiles, are still in action today. And whilst they may have been unreliable and indiscriminate, they were no worse that the RAF’s early attempts at night bombing where dead-reckoning with unknown wind-factors through clouds in the pitch black quite often had them bombing the wrong country, never mind the wrong city.
And as for 22,892 civilians dead in a 12-month period (which puzzles me as they were first used in action in mid-June 1944 and the war was over in early May 1945 – some 10.5 months later), how does that compare with the documented 250,000 killed IN ONE NIGHT in Dresden? A figure that was initially claimed as “only 25,000” and which for many years was disputed by the United Nations. The British government begrudingly admit “only about 100,000” today, but that’s simply the known deaths or identified corpses.
Anyway, none of the foregoing changes my opinion. The RAF with its adoption of the Lindemann report of 30 March 1942 deliberately targeted civilians in its bombing campaign over Germany and its members who flew on missions are just as guilty of war crimes including murder and genocide as any Nazi and they should be tried as such. Bishop Bell of Chichester who was for a long time the only activist speaking out against the terror-bombers said “Must we take the devil for our example?” And quite rightly so.