The Canadian War Museum and Bomber Command: My Perspective
Abstract: This article is based on David Bercuson’s keynote address at the 22nd Military History Colloquium held at the University of Waterloo in May 2011. Bercuson discusses his role in the controversy over the panel text about the Combined Bomber Offensive at the new Canadian War Museum. Arguing that the original text was not wrong, but reflected older scholarship, he concludes by observing that no serious scholar, whether a single author or a museum staff, should be saved from the age-old processes of historical review, revision and re-writing to reflect more recent research when it is more accurate. Four years ago I became embroiled in the controversy arising from the Canadian War Museum’s exhibit of the Allied bomber war, also called the “Combined Bomber Offensive” or CBO. That controversy came to the public’s attention in the fall of 2006 due to the objections of the portrayal of the bomber war in the museum by Canadian veterans of Bomber Command. The veterans were joined by, among others, former Canadian chief of the defence staff Paul Manson, who had also been commander of Canadian Forces Air Command and a fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in Europe during the Cold War.1 They made various claims that the exhibit had, deliberately or inadvertently, portrayed the bomber war as terror bombing and akin to a war crime. They made their case in the media and in front of a Senate committee.2 Eventually they succeeded in having the words of the exhibit altered. At no time did I ever have any connection to any of those activities nor did I register any opinion about what they were saying. I had played a role in an earlier kerfuffle as an advisor to the CBC Ombudsman at the time of the “Valour and the Horror” series; I had no intention of getting involved in any such public controversy again. I first saw the magnificent new Canadian War Museum a few months after it opened in 2005 when I was invited to sit on a panel organized by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives at the museum. I cannot remember the topic. I do remember that we panellists were given a guided tour of the museum and I distinctly remember being disturbed by the words of one panel of the bomber exhibit which declared: “The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested. Bomber Command’s aim was to crush civilian morale and force Germany to surrender by destroying its cities and industrial installations. Although Bomber Command and American attacks left 600,000 Germans dead, and more than five million homeless, the raids resulted in only small reductions in German war production until late in the war.” The pictures on the panel to the immediate left of those words showed, from top to bottom, a heavily damaged factory complex, a heavily damaged German city with a destroyed bridge and finally pictures of burned German corpses lying in a street or square. I had little argument with the statement of Bomber Command’s aims. I was more than familiar with the history of Bomber Command and its commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, including his refusal to accede to the wishes the chief of the air staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, expressed so often in 1944, that Harris ease off his area attacks and focus on major strategic targets such as oil, transportation and the aircraft industry. I also knew that about one quarter of Bomber Command’s targets were German war industry. I was also fully aware that the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) and the British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU) – and some historians of the air war – had concluded that bombing Germany had limited results through most of the war.3 Indeed, volume III of the official history of the RCAF, The Crucible of War, had arrived at the same conclusion4 though with little research and analysis of its own. But other historians and air power The Canadian War Museum and Bomber Command My Perspective
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
and shows none of the projected Dorflandschaften. Wolschke-Bulmahn is undoubtedly right to argue “Urban architecture and landscape design were inextricably linked to the terror regime of the Nazis. Planning professionals for the most part enthusiastically welcomed these new realities and legitimized them. Their ideal conceptions for designing villages, towns, and landscapes were based on disenfranchising, dispossessing, and exterminating human beings” (p. 253). But, for evidence readers will have to turn to the larger studies from which this essay is excerpted, or to the well-illustrated account by Michael Hartenstein, Neue Dorflandschaften. Nationalsozialistische Siedlungsplanung in den “eingegliederten Ostgebieten” 1939 bis 1944 (Berlin: Köster, 1998), or to the case study in David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2006). That ethnic Germans as well as Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews were harmed by the recasting and “cleansing” of eastern lands seems to have escaped all these authors. To return to the second suggestion in the introduction, namely regarding environmentalism in the twentieth century, an appropriate approach for a future volume would be comparative. Given the emphasis in these essays on annexed-area colonialism, the supposed “white man’s burden” of “caring” for those “incapable” of caring for themselves and their own lands could be posed as a question: how have the various empires (whether British, French, Soviet, or American) of the twentieth century handled environmental issues abroad and how violently have they exploited (or planned to exploit) colonies and conquered areas in disregard of people and landscapes? That might help to answer the related question: “how different were the Nazis” in their light greenness and heavy brownness?
Persius and the Programmatic Satire: A Study in Form and Imagery
Introduction 1. Style and expression in Persius' fifth satire 2. The programmatic satire and the method of Persius I 3. The nature and sources of Persius' imagery 4. Persius' first satire: analysis 5. Grandeur and humility: Juvenal and the high style Appendixes Text Translation Index of modern authors Index locorum potiorum Index of images, topics and words.