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 (an excerpt)
The majority of accounts of the Second World War have described Nazi Germany as an uncontrollable monster with a highly industrialized economy. But what if it was not so? What if the European tragedy was not rooted in Germany’s strength, but in its weakness?Adam Tooze has written a radically new history of the Second World War. The author achieved this by taking into account racial relations and politics, with special attention focused on economy. Understanding of the global economy played a critical role in Hitler’s views. He guessed that Germany’s relative poverty in 1933 was conditioned by not only the Great Depression but also limitations of its territory and natural resources. He foresaw a rise of a new globalized world where Europe would be pressed by the unbreakable power of America. There was a last chance: the European superstate led by Germany. However, the global balance of economic and military forces did not initially favor of Hitler. With the purposeof preventing the threat from the West, he sent his poorly armed troops to conquer Europe which led to the crash of his intentions. Even in the summer of 1940, a time of Germany’s great triumphs, Hitler was worried about America’s air and maritime domination, which he was convinced was the result of a Jewish conspiracy. As soon as the Wehrmacht came into Soviet territory, the war turned into a battle of attrition without any hope of Germany’s winning. Because Hitler and others did not accept this, the Third Reich was destroyed at the costof millions of lives.The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the “Introduction” to this book.
Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair
In recent years, controversies concerning the construction of displays of historical events have turned attention to the role of these public sitings. Although virtually any location to which access is relatively unrestricted may give rise to disputes, museums in particular have become foci of these debates. Their prominence is not surprising, since they are institutions in which a nation's qualities are ‘written’ or ‘shown.’ In this chapter I turn my attention to an important polemic in which two nations are involved: the United States and Japan. The subject is how the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to be represented by a museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It allows me to examine more deeply the interactions of groups representing divergent interests within the United States, in the context of global relations with a relative equal, rather than a dominated subject. In the process, I analyze the role of the museum as an institution involved in the construction of national narratives in two countries, the political controversies unveiled, and the lost opportunities for innovation in the museum's relationship to its public as politicians intrude upon professions.