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Bomber Command Memorial
A harder rain
13 July 2012

Bomber Command memorial 1

Bomber Command memorial 2

Bomber Command memorial 3

Bomber Command memorial 4

It was a European, British and Commonwealth tragedy, that relentless hard rain that fell on Germany and its occupied territories in WWII, thousands of doomed aircraft among the hundreds of thousands of bombs, but there's no argument that the Luftwaffe started it, that the courage displayed by the aircrew was almost beyond human imagination, and that the failure to provide any sort of memorial to Bomber Command has been an utter travesty. Respect, among many others, to the late Robin Gibb for all his efforts to get the memorial back on the agenda and built.  

The rain was falling on Hyde Park Corner in the distance as we walked westwards along the north side of Green Park, and began to fall quite heavily as we arrived at the memorial, which seemed appropriate. A stunningly powerful tribute, hard to hold back the tears.

And there's something about the grouping of the figures that makes you think of the forced camaraderie, the sardine-like conditions inside those thunderous fuselages, and the compaction of the the aircrews that fell from the skies into the hard earth.

And chastening to think that a single bombing raid on Nuremberg in 1944 led to the deaths of more Bomber Command aircrew (with 94 aircraft lost) than were lost in the entirety of the Battle of Britain. Some sense of what that night was like can be found here.

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