The Lancaster bomber which droned overhead on 31 May, to coincide with the unveiling of the new statue to Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, evoked nostalgia among manv older Londoners, Germans who survived the second world war would have had different feelings.
For the Lancasters, together with American Flying Fortresses, were the backbone of the air fleet which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of German civilians between 1943 and 1945.
Bomber Harris, although C in-C of Bomber Command, did not invent the campaign to massacre German cívilians. The decision to unleash a campaign of mass slaughter was made by the British and American Churchill's air war advisor, Professor FA Lindemann, estimated that German morale could be broken by the mass bombing of working class disriets in the 58 German ctiee with more than 100,00 inhabitants. A SAiTa of the population, he reckoned, could made homeless Lindemann's 1942 report was adopted and Harris given its execution. It was announced over the skies of Hamburg on 24 August 1943. the British by night and Americans by day - 50,000 civilians were dead. This compares with a figure of 51,509 for the total British losses in German bombing raids during the war. In the notorious German attack on Coventry, just 308 people were killed.
Hamburg was notable as the first German city in which bombing had resulted in a firestorm during the war. Part of the bombing plan was to combine high explosive with incendiary tent of causing a massively firestorm. Firestorm attacks Konigsberg WOC Ul Darmsta Brunswick. Heilbronn and finally, in the most war, Dresden. thousands were killed in raids on claes like Cologne and Berlin, where the destruction failed to ignite a firestorm The firestorm raid Dresden February 1943 killed town autocl of people; 135,000 is one of the lowest esOROTS more than 200,000. After two waves of British bombers during the night, those attempting escule work the next day were hit by US Flying Fortresses. The Dresden raid was the first in history where the survivors could not cope with burying the dead. Tens of thousands died sheltering in cellars, their bodies often fused together in an indistinguishable lump of carbon. One Dresden pensioner Tecanea 'One shape I shall never forget was the remains of what had this is very early in terms of the 15 billion-year history of the universe, it was after the formation of galaxtes. Thus we cannot directly observe the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Until the formation galaxies, the even distribution of matter meant that the charred into one piece, and had ocen stuck oaly to the as phalt. They had to be prised up.
The child must have been undemeath the mother. because you could clearly see its shape, wit is mower s arms casped around it' The slaughterhouse of Dresden was the curtain-raiser for ine arestoam combink of lokyo (where 90,000 were killed) and other Japanese cities, culminatng in te dropping of the atom bombs Hiroshima anc Nagasaki.
Bomber Harris enthusiastically and efficiently carried out the orders given by others. Those orders were to slaushter and disperse the German working class - or at least that section of it which had not been sent by Hitler to die on the Russian tront.
When Dresden was bombed the Red Army was just 80 miles away and Germany obviously defeated. Indeed the air marshais were concerned lest the bombers lose their way and accidentally attack the Russians.
The excuse for the raid was the Dresden was an important railway centre. Within a few days the trains were running through the city again.
Bomber Harris was only doing his job - just like Eichmann and Himmler with the concentration camps. Erecting a statue to him is an obscenity London can do without.
legrees above absolute zero The COBE satellite acts as i sort of thermometer, measurine temperatures in differen' parts of the universe with astonishing accuracy. The different theories of the origin of the universe predict different temperatures variations. Now we can measure these variations, we can sort out the viable and the non-viable theories. Hence all the excitement.
To cuta long story short, the COBE results are at least compatible with the Big Bang Hence the general sigh of relief among cosmologists world-wide. Potentially at least the results explain that there were ripples in the fabric of space, when the universe was nfinitelv small, which worked their way through into temperature differences, creating unevenness in the universe and allowing the formation of galaxies and stars.
Much of cosmology in the ast couple of decades has been concerned with the process of the formation of the universe. Once we agree on the eneral dynamics of the Big Bang, much bigger questions naturally occur; like what