Why political correctness has denied wartime bomber
crews the honour they deserve...
One of posterity's worst vices, 63 years after the end of World War II, is to dub everyone who served in it a hero.
In one sense, perhaps they were, in comparison with our own privileged generation, which has never had to eat whale meat and powdered egg; sleep night after night amid German bombing; suffer years of separation from loved ones; and, in some cases, endure the heat of battle.
But "hero" is a special word, which ought to be used very sparingly.
We should be sufficiently grown-up to recognise a distinction between the perils faced by an Army storeman working in a base camp, whose chances of meeting violent death in 1942 were hardly greater than those of a cashier running a till in Waitrose in 2008, and those of a front-line soldier.
PC victims: Bombers carried out one of the deadliest jobs but have not been honoured
By contrast a PBI, "poor bloody infantryman" was lucky to survive a single campaign unwounded.
Around 85 per cent of Army casualties were riflemen.
The average soldier, sailor or airman who served with British forces between 1939 and 1945 faced a 1-in-19 risk of being killed.
To be sure, they all 'did their bit' even those pushing paper in some general's headquarters in London.
But some men found themselves fulfilling roles which tilted the averages dramatically against them. Consider those who flew for the RAF's Bomber Command.
Forget about 1-in-19.
Their chances of completing a "tour" of 30 operations were worse than evens.
Each man possessed a more realistic prospect of dying than of surviving.
Yet without much complaint, they took off night after night, year after year, to do what they were told was necessary to help Britain win the war.
In their late teens and early 20s, they braved flak and fighters, weather and searchlights.
Among the aircrew of Bomber Command who flew Lancasters and Mosquitoes, Halifaxes and Stirlings over Germany through five long years, 55,573 were killed.
Their veterans, about 30,000 are still with us today, are men to marvel at, in the way our ancestors marvelled at survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Statistically, these old men have no right to be here.
Most of those who did what they did have been mouldering in the cemeteries of Europe since the early 1940s.
Take the experience of navigator Tony Aveline.
On his first trip to Berlin as a passenger with an experienced crew in 1943, his aircraft was picked up by searchlights and attacked by a fighter.
It lost two engines and caught fire in one wing. The hydraulics failed and the wireless went dead.
Blaspheming continually in their fear, the crew flew their shot-torn aircraft back across Holland and the North Sea to crash in a Lincolnshire field.
Crawling out of the wreck, Aveline asked: "Is it always like this?"
But he went on to fly two tours.
Talking in North London 30 years later, he dismissed any talk of heroics.
Like most young men in the war, he said: "I never thought about the value of it all. I just wanted it to end."
If we want to identify authentic "heroes", surely those who faced some of the war's most awful perils in the service of King and Country deserve that title.
Yet today, in their little flats and bungalows up and down Britain, many of the old men who did remarkable things over Germany almost seven decades ago are resentful, even bitter.
For decades, they have been seeking recognition of the special and terrible nature of their war.
In 1945, along with everybody else who flew, they were awarded the Aircrew Europe campaign medal.
Yet transport crews and even fighter pilots suffered only a fraction of their casualties.
"Harris's old lags" ? as they called themselves with defiant pride after their leader Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris ? want a Bomber Command campaign medal, to commemorate those who took the war to Hitler's Germany when no soldiers could.
A 1940 Battle of Britain medal was struck for "the Few".
Why was nothing similar done for the men of Bomber Command, whose own contribution to victory was purchased at the cost of vastly higher losses?
The answer, of course, is that even in 1945 when officialdom issued campaign "gongs", bombing had become a sensitive issue.
Winston Churchill sought to distance himself from the destruction of Dresden.
Once victory was achieved, the allied occupiers of Germany, gazing upon its shattered cities, were seized by misgivings about whether such carnage had been necessary.
"Bomber" Harris, Commander-in- Chief of Bomber Command, was an obsessively single-minded officer, who ? unlike the politicians ? never sought to disguise what his aircraft were doing.
"I would not regard the remaining cities of Germany," he wrote contemptuously in March 1945, "as worth the bones of one British grenadier."
During a war of national survival, Harris's qualities proved invaluable.
But once peace came, once the world enjoyed the luxury of allowing softer and more civilised values to reassert themselves, Harris's elemental commitment to destruction became an embarrassment.
"A considerable commander," Churchill in old age said of his bomber supremo, "but there was a certain coarseness about him."
Harris was offered no peerage by the 1945 Labour Government, though almost all the nation's other commanders received titles.
The survivors of his squadrons ? "the few" indeed, compared with those who had perished, took home the same "gong" as aircrew who had flown "milk runs".
This seemed unjust in 1945, and even more so now.
No sensible person thinks less of our soldiers' deeds in Iraq or Afghanistan, because Tony Blair's wars are unpopular.
Whatever we think of the wartime bombing of Germany's cities, it is surely wrong to withhold respect, and indeed admiration, from the aircrew who carried it out.
Harris was no freelance warlord.
He was appointed to his post by the Chief of Air Staff and Prime Minister.
He did not invent the "area bombing" which began in 1942.
That was a policy devised by others, after the failure of 1940 to 1941 precision bombing.
The airman was commissioned to attack Germany's cities, and did so with a dedication that won Churchill's warm approval in 1942 to 1943, and made Harris a famous figure in wartime Britain.
As for his crews, those young men were very afraid.
In their eyes, Germany was not a place of innocent Gasthausen and beer cellars where buxom girls smiled and drinkers stamped their feet to accordion music.
It was, instead, a terrifying hostile environment where British airmen died in their hundreds every night.
If they thought at all about what lay beneath them, they imagined flak gunners in their coalscuttle helmets pumping up 88mm shells, the searchlight crews directing those deadly beams of light that made a man feel, in the words of one pilot, "as if reproving fingers were pointing at him, as if he himself were a naughty boy suddenly discovered in the dark of a larder".
The crews of Bomber Command were very young, and sprung from a generation accustomed to defer to authority.
They had been trained, dispatched to Germany to release their bombloads at a given point.
They were told that by doing so, they were making a vital contribution to the war effort.
With great fear in most of their hearts, they went out each night to do no more and no less than they had been ordered.
They thought little about the fact that their operations were killing thousands of German civilians. Their commanders, naturally enough, said nothing about this. The victims were invisible from 15,000 ft.
The Allies began bombing Germany in earnest at a time when 30,000 British civilians had already perished under the Luftwaffe's blitz.
It was absurd to suppose that the morality of bombing could, or should, have troubled the thoughts of young aircrew overwhelmingly preoccupied with the likelihood of their own extinction.
In Germany today there is much enthusiasm for moral equivalence about World War II.
I have heard elderly Germans say: "Everybody does terrible things in war. For us, it was the killing of the Jews. For the Allies, it was the killing of half a million civilians by bombing our cities."
Yet most of us reject this view ? as should today's British Government.
Germany started the war, and fought to the last ditch with unique ferocity.
The bomber offensive did not represent a racial atrocity remotely comparable with the Holocaust.
The strategic bomber offensive was a military operation designed to advance the defeat of Nazism, to hasten the triumph of democracy and freedom.
The British administration should not for a moment be deterred from granting a Bomber Command campaign medal for fear of upsetting German opinion.
A medal would not represent a 21st-century endorsement of area bombing.
It would merely be a long-overdue act of justice to those who flew.
A civilised society, which recognises its debt to the wartime generation, should be capable of revisiting a cruelly ungenerous Whitehall decision.
This summer, if you look up at the sky and happen to glimpse the surviving Lancaster of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, a sight that brings a tear to the eyes of most of us; think of those 30,000 old men, who flew such a plane through the deadly darkness over Germany all those years ago.
They deserve better from us than they have received.
It is not too late to make amends to some of our bravest men.