Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe, said in September 1939, before the commencement of the Second World War:

No enemy bomber can reach the Ruhr. If one reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Goering. You may call me Meyer.

Obviously, Bomber Command, and the role it played in the Second World War, was a slap in the face of that Nazi braggadocio who symbolised that evil regime. The role Bomber Command played is being remembered on the 70th anniversary by the great Australian veterans who flew in that force. I remember standing in Berlin with an Australian parliamentary delegation at the Commonwealth war graves and putting a red rose on the grave of each of the 42 Australian flyers who were shot down and killed. During World War II, 20,000 Australian airmen served with Bomber Command in the Royal Air Force. Their exacting two-year training, undertaken with the Empire Air Training Scheme, proved to be the difference which enabled Allied crews eventually to triumph over their very formidable foes in the Luftwaffe. What was their service like? The great military historian Max Hastings has just published his new book All Hell Let Loose in which he says of their service in Bomber Command that they did not agonise much:

… or at all, about the fate of those who died beneath their bomb doors; it was because flying for eight or ten hours either in daylight formation amid flak and fighters like the men of the USAAF, or through lonely darkness, as did those of the RAF, imposed relentless strain and frequent terror. The monotony of bombing missions was shattered only when crews encountered the hellish sights and sounds of combat and bomb runs over cities in Germany or Japan.

The bravery and sacrifice of Bomber Command cannot be underestimated. Some of them were regular RAF officers, like Group Captain Hughie Edwards, who was awarded a Victoria Cross as early as 1941 and who originally trained with the RAF. Some of them went into this conflict with diffidence. The courageous English pilot Laurie Stockwell, who was shot down over Berlin and died in 1943, asked his mother in a letter to her:

Do you remember a small boy saying he would be a conscientious objector if war came? Things happened to change that small boy's view—talk of brutality, human suffering, atrocities—but they did not have any great effect on changing my mind for I realised we are capable of doing these deeds of which we read much these days. It is the fact that a few people wish to take freedom from the peoples of the Earth that changed my views. You may have noticed I have not mentioned fighting for one's country, for the Empire. For me this is just foolishness.

These are the great people who sacrificed their lives, as the previous member said, in the struggle of Bomber Command in the Second World War. We know that by the end of 1941, 300 Australians, mostly pilots, were members of 46 Bomber Command squadrons and 1941 was the year that two Australian medium bomber squadrons were formed—445 in June and 458 in September 1941. Both of these squadrons flew regular missions over Germany by the end of 1941. The consolidation, unfortunately, of RAAF men into RAF units in Bomber Command never compared with Canadian No. 6 Group. Unfortunately, a decision was made by the RAF, with which Australia acquiesced, to have most of our people in Bomber Command absorbed into British crews.

We remember that in 1942 the Pathfinder Force was created under the command of an Australian, Air Commodore Donald Bennett, an acknowledged expert in navigation. We remember that an Australian pilot flying with 149 Squadron RAF was the only member of the RAAF flying with Bomber Command to win a Victoria Cross. Flight Sergeant Rawdon Middleton was flying a four-engined Stirling bomber in November 1942 when the aircraft was hit on its way to Turin. He was over the target when the aircraft was hit again, this time seriously wounding Middleton. Despite his wounds Middleton flew back to England, where five of the crew were able to bail out safely, but with fuel almost exhausted. Middleton was killed when the aircraft crashed at sea. We remember that, during the Battle of the Ruhr, the famous dambusters raid took place. Sixteen Lancasters, carrying 13 Australians, four of whom were captains of their aircraft, made this attack. Eight Lancasters were lost—an incredible loss, given the number of aircraft that participated—involving the death of 55 men, with a solitary Australian rear gunner surviving to become a prisoner of war. Of the 12 other Australians, only two were killed, with 10 returning safely.

There were 795 bombers, including 75 from the four RAAF squadrons, dispatched on the momentous British raid on Nuremberg in March 1944. Ninety-five aircraft, including five Australian aircraft, failed to return. This was the worst loss to Bomber Command during the entire war. Five RAAF aircraft, with 35 aircrew, were lost, of whom seven of the 20 killed were Australians. Another 40 Australians, including 11 pilots flying with 16 different RAF squadrons that night, were killed. That gives some indication of the Australian contribution to the air war in Europe. Australian casualties in Bomber Command reached 3,486 dead and 265 injured. After the war, 750 Australian aircrew were released from German stalags.

We should honour the men of Bomber Command for the part they played in the bombing of Germany. Mr Hastings gives a very moving account of what it was like to be in Bomber Command:

Allied aircrew, once deployed on operational fighter or bomber squadrons until the last eighteen months of the war confronted the statistical probability of their own extinction.

And they still flew. Hastings says later:

More than half the RAF's heavy bomber crews—

you have to remember that this is where all the Australians served—

perished, 56,000 men in all.

The United States Army Air Force, with 100,000 men participating in the strategic offensive against Germany, lost 26,000 killed, with a further 20,000 taken prisoner. One of the pilots of a British Whitley bomber, Sid Bufton, said, 'You were resigned to dying every night.'

The campaign was the only way the Allied forces had to influence the fight against Nazi Germany in those days. It was a fight that maintained morale during the harshest and darkest days of the war. The last visit of the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, to Berlin, in the period of the infamous Stalin-Hitler pact, took place on 13 November 1940. According to an account by Stalin, while he was there an air raid took place:

When the alarm sounded Ribbentrop led the way down many flights of stairs to a deep shelter, sumptuously furnished. By the time he got inside the raid had begun. He shut the door and said to Molotov: 'Now that we are alone together, why should we not divide [the world]?' Molotov said: 'What will England say?' 'England,' said Ribbentrop, 'is finished. She is no more use as a Power.' 'If that is so,' said Molotov, 'why are we in this shelter, and whose are these bombs which fall?'

A very apposite point that is understood if you look at the fact that, during the long years before the Allied armies engaged the Germans in strength, Britain's Prime Minister and the US President in effect colluded to proclaim the triumphs of bombing. As Hastings said:

Sir Arthur Harris, who became Bomber Command's C-in-C in 1942, said: 'Winston's attitude to bombing was "Anything to put up a show." If we hadn't [used Bomber Command] we would only have had the U-boat war, and as he said, defence of our trade routes was not an instrument of war.' Churchill regarded the bomber offensive as a vital weapon in Western relations with Stalin, in some small degree—

keeping in the war the Soviets, who were concerned about—

Anglo-American sluggishness in launching a second front.

If the great Churchill thought Bomber Command's activities—even the exaggeration of them and their effectiveness—essential to keep the Soviets in the war, I, and we, must defer to his judgments. It is all very well now to know how events turned out, but if you were faced—as the British and the Americans and indeed Australia were—with the fact that the Russians had been in close collusion with the Germans until June 1941, at any point it would have been disastrous for all of us if the Russians had made an agreement with the Germans and stopped the war. Imagine the blood and treasure that Australia, Britain and the United States would have had to invest to defeat Germany alone. So Bomber Command's role was extremely important. The great Churchill thought so, and if exaggerating it kept the Russians in the war, it was the right thing.

It is true, as the great man said, 'Bomber Command turned out to be more of a bludgeon than a rapier, but it did do the following three things: it obliged the Germans to divert growing numbers of their fighters and dual purpose 88-millimetre guns from the eastern front to the defence of the Reich. Hastings says that Berlin alone was defended by a hundred batteries of 16 to 24 guns, each manned by crews of 11. And most importantly—as we all understand from the bombing of Germany—it was also claimed by Albert Speer, the quartermaster of the Reich, who contrived to increase output even amid the massive raids of 1944, that vastly more weapons would have been built, with serious consequences for the Allied armies, if factory operations had not been impeded. There are only 11 months from the invasion by the Allies in June 1944 to the fall of Germany, but if there had been vastly more armaments production by the Germans, that would have seen a great number of Allied people killed.

I conclude by saying the campaign was the only way the Allied forces had to attack Germany. It was a fight that maintained the morale of the Western publics during the harshest and darkest days of the war. Twenty thousand Australians served during that campaign; 3,500 gave their lives and have the gratitude of this nation. Their actions and sacrifices have made the world and Australia a better place.

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