Bombers who still fan the flames

ONCE the high explosives and small phosphorus bombs with their load of sticky fire had been dropped on the German homes below, there was little time for the seven men cramped in a Lancaster bomber to study the flames, let alone think of women and children burning.

They were too busy fighting for their own survival. At the height of the bombing during the closing stages of the war, only one in three of the Allied crews survived.

No wonder the subject stirs up so many emotions. The morality of a policy of deliberate mass killing of German civilians, last raised in 1992 along with the memorial to Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, Bomber Command's leader, is about to be debated again.

A Canadian documentary, The Valour and the Horror, to be shown on Channel 4 at 7pm tomorrow, re-examines the campaign and questions the terror bombing demanded by the War Cabinet. The programme salutes the bravery of 50,000 Canadian volunteers and their Allied peers, and condemns the operations they were ordered to carry out.

In Canada, some former airmen were so angered and distressed by the documentary that they brought an unsuccessful action for defamation against its makers, including Brian McKenna, the director.

Next Saturday, at 6.30pm, Right to Reply will offer outraged veterans and military historians who disagree with the film a chance to speak. Michael Floyd, a former British pilot with sympathies on both sides of this painful divide, will be among them.

From August 1943, when he was 20, Mr Floyd flew Lancasters on a total of 29 missions. His older brother, also in Bomber Command, died in one of the first mass bombing raids over Cologne.

'At night, you didn't see other planes until they attacked you,' Mr Floyd says. 'There were flares and all sorts of coloured lights, gunfire bursts, little clouds floating across the sky. And the fires, of course. But all pretty distant. That was the eerie thing about it. You were totally isolated from the conflagration. It just looked like a fine fireworks display at Battersea Park.'

The Lancasters set out at dusk for Germany from 103 Squadron's north Lincolnshire base. The boys who were fortunate returned at dawn. 'There was such a contrast,' Mr Floyd says. 'You'd fly back and suddenly you were in the countryside, in the morning, with birds singing and a nice breakfast waiting. It was an odd war experience.

'Dozens of my friends died. You would have been drinking with them the night before, and then they weren't there. And yet I only saw one body through the whole war. Once the plane was shot up, my rear gunner was killed, and one or two people hurt.'

Some of the pilots interviewed in The Valour and the Horror say they thought the raids were directed at industrial targets. Another describes how he realised, slowly and with shock, that the real purpose was to kill civilians. Mr Floyd says he knew the truth all along. 'There was no suggestion that the raids were anything other than indiscriminate,' he says. 'Apart from the fact that some of the targets were industrial towns, there was no suggestion of aiming at a particular building, and night bombing wasn't very accurate anyway.'

Despite the concentration on survival and the stresses, excitement and close comradeship of the job, there was still room in Mr Floyd's mind for reservations about the bombing. Before volunteering from college in 1941, he had been to Germany on holiday and met Germans whom he liked.

'My memory of any discussion was that if you suggested there were some good Germans, you were regarded as eccentric, perhaps dangerously so. People felt they were fighting a very nasty enemy and every aspect of the country was evil. I didn't hold those opinions.'

And this almost subhuman species, the German Nazis, had, after all, started it. In this climate Bomber Harris received his orders. He spelt out the aim for Bomber Command: to kill 900,000 people and seriously injure 1 million during 1943-44. Inevitably, although Harris disputed this, in cities depleted of fighting men most of the victims were likely to be the aged and women and children.

After surviving his missions, many over Berlin, Mr Floyd was sent to become an instructor. The war finished before he saw combat again. He finished training as an architect and married Pat, a former WAAF wireless operator.

Now he is not sure whether the bombing he helped to carry out was militarily effective. Nevertheless, he thinks the documentary is biased against Bomber Command's pragmatic role.

But Mr Floyd, who is now a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, agrees that the policy of indiscriminate bombing of civilians, in which his friends and brother died, was morally wrong. 'I think that's the only sure conclusion. Otherwise it lays a path for accepting mass execution of civilians as a legitimate means of defence,' he says. 'I fully recognise that in the heat of the moment it wasn't seen that way.'

Such hard questions must be worth our time. Young men died in the bombing raids over Germany with the aim of preserving democracy and freedom - the only climate in which such issues can be discussed.

(Photograph omitted)