Our Compass for our Future ~ Part I

Art Review

Our Compass for our Future ~ Part I

The banner image depicts a Heinkel 1-11 of the Luftwaffe from the famous painting entitled 'Blitz on Liverpool' by David Bright - with all rights reserved to the artist

Introduction

Written in 2014, I have deliberately left this in present, not past, tense, despite some people having now departed. How strange that despite 2014 seeing the illegal annexation of Ukraine, and a proxy war fought by Russia as it always does best, fighting dirty, fighting without morality, fighting with a Great War and Great Patriotic War ‘cannon fodder mentality’, that none of us foresaw, or, if we did, chose to ignore, that all of us were hurtling headlong to 3am Thursday 24 February 2022 and the illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine. How strange, that at the time of writing, I had no idea that Chapter One Part VI would report upon the War in Ukraine.

Chapter One

I

THIS PAINTING, 'Blitz on Liverpool' by David Bright, really did pull me up, for not only have I flown many times at this height over the city and seen this view, but it is, with pin-point accuracy, directly over where I have lived for 12 years (until 2017). My home was on the Waterfront in between the first two searchlight beams - more accurately, 300 meters (984 ft) from the first searchlight battery.

I lived opposite the historic mooring, which is amidst this conflagration, of the RMS Lusitania [i] sunk during World War I on 7 May 1915 just off the Irish Coast. I mention these things to highlight this city's history and this country's history, and to encourage us all to look around us ~ in whichever country, city, town, village or hamlet we live - to see not just the immediate, to see not just a very long hewn-stone flowerbed, but to quietly allow history to seep in …

II

Wow. Hey! That’s not an architect’s flamboyant over-the-top flower pot design, that’s a drinking trough for horses.
Goodness, there must have been room for at least four horses to drink at any one time, right on this corner of this junction.
And look!
The lamp posts.
Surely, those have to be originals.

What’s that? VR?

Hey, everyone, look! This lamp post is over a hundred and twenty years old.

Oh yeah? How do you know that?

It’s Victoria Regina.
And I remember in my history class that
Victoria was Queen-Empress and kicked the bucket in 1901!
So there!!

Good for you, young lady.

Watch my lips. 

Less of the ‘kicked the bucket’.

I’m directly linked to the generation
that lived within the reign of Queen Victoria.

Oh yeah? How so? That’s plain daft.

My four grandparents. 

Two were born in 1887 

and the other two

in 1899 and 1900.
Game set and match!

You tell her, Ken!! Woo Hoo!!

Marcus! Less back chat.
Last month you thought ‘blitz’
was a chocolate bar.

Oh look?
Our coffees are empty.
Your round people!!

Typical!!!


III

1940 and all that is now all 'old hat', 'old fashioned', 'boring'...because it's pre-scrolling, pre-social media, pre-internet, pre-word processor, even. What’s a word-processor?

I just let silence reply.

But people living then would quickly disabuse all of us... they, too, were living at the cutting edge of technology... …

In 2018, I visited the Yorkshire Air Museum [ii] based at the old RAF Elvington wartime airbase, and home at that time to the Free French Air Force. As a nephew of a Bomber Command pilot, I was given a tour of the interior of a Handley Page Halifax four-engined heavy bomber. The aircraft on display is almost identical to the Mark V Halifax DK165 MP-E that flew its final mission on 16-17 April, 1943.

I have written about this separately on my aviation website, here.

I was fascinated to stand next to the pilot’s seat and look at that which Ken Webb Snr (21) - a sergeant-pilot and skipper (or captain) - would have seen and been dealing with. I asked quite a few questions, and one reply confirmed that the small switch to the left of the pilot was the auto-pilot. A rudimentary explanation followed. What struck me was that my uncle even had auto-pilot capability.

Sometimes, we need to wait awhile before we obtain the whole picture.

In this case, fast forward to 2021 and the best-selling book by Colonel Richard ‘Eager’ Ernest Evans USAF and his daughter Barbara Evans Kinnear “Richard Eager” A Pilot’s Story. [iii] In this book, Colonel Evans provides a superb report on how the auto-pilot worked in the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator. Dick, as we learn to see him when we read his moving memoir, fills all the spaces in and, for me, perfectly bridged the gap between me standing in the Halifax cockpit in 2018, and now, and thinking to myself, cutting-edge technology is not the exclusive preserve of the present. Cutting-Edge Technology is ever-present.

IV

Picking up, for the moment, the theme in Part I above, when I listen to my own mother's experiences, there are times when I'm pulled up short. Looking out across the famous park and lakes in Cheltenham - the parental family home is just a stone's throw from where my mother lived throughout the War - I still have to pull myself up that my mother watched the bombers coming in across the park - the beautiful view I'm looking at as I type this - and then seeing a street going up.

Sometimes, I think perhaps it's imagination. But then I recall my father's experience, a stone's throw in the opposite direction of Pittville Mount Park, to the left (the Park is neatly divided into two by the main Evesham Road), over the great and high trees, many of them standing then, as they still do now, indeed, even in the 19th century.

Dad, a teenager, was standing in his bedroom - by the time I arrived thirteen years later in 1953 it was called the box room - at 7 am watching a Messerschmitt 110 twin-engined Zerstörer (Destroyer) flying along the Windsor Street rooftops machine-gunning the streets, and seeing his father and the next door neighbour, Mr Goldsmith, lying in the gutter covering their heads.

Dad and I chatted about this often during his lifetime and wondered what Grandad and Mr Goldsmith must have felt, taking cover in the safety of their own street deep in the heart of Britain. ‘Can you believe it, Horace? Here we are again, twenty-two years on, taking cover from the same enemy but in our own street, outside our own front doors.’

Obviously, that’s me, imagining my grandfather’s likely reaction.

Knowing Grandad as I do ~ he had a beautiful way of always seeing comedy in the moment - I can, even now almost hear that lovely giggle. A trait very happily carried on by my father, and my father’s grandson.

But Dad’s mention of that horrid symbol … I still recall that cold dread passing down my back …

I looked out the bedroom window to see this swastika …!

That stayed with me more than anything else because until well into my adulthood, the one thing that all the aero-modelling companies were not permitted to include in modelling kits was the transfer of the swastika. To do so was a criminal offence.

This is but a minor recollection that many people, still living, can recount in the towns, cities and ports of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland between 1939-1945. Likewise, many people in all of the countries that made up ‘Occupied Europe’.

Dark Days of 1940

A Messerschmitt 110 twin-engine

fighter-bomber

That accursed symbol!

I looked out the bedroom window

to see this swastika…!

DBW

Whilst the first image
is from an engagement over Britain
during the Battle of Britain, 1940,
I have selected this image to reflect the close proximity and detail.

At rooftop height, flying over Windsor Street, the aircraft was eventually brought down over Gloucester a few minutes later.

There are times when I do know not what to believe. Throughout his life, my father’s account never changed. On the one hand the plane was machine-gunning the rooftops, on the other hand, Dad said, I could see the gunner behind the pilot. I could see his face. And he saw me and was gesturing to me to get down. KTW

V

To my fellow Liverpudlians, as you wander around the town - have a look at the buildings - it doesn't take long to see the wide areas of devastation to the City. How? Stand still, then start to compare and contrast the architecture. It is not long before one can see beyond and into history, almost as if stepping through the hole in the wall. I did this Hamburg and Berlin, too.

Now go to the Pig & Whistle in Chapel Street across the road from my dock. Standing next to the P&W is single charred two-storey facade hinged to the pub's wall. In 1941 it was many storeys higher, and that small section is left as a memorial to the People and City of Liverpool, as well as to the whole British population, for at the height of the Blitz, nationwide, forty-three thousand people were killed in 1940,[iv] a factor that we grasp now, with the Pandemic having resulted in 147,000 deaths, which includes yesterday’s figure of 172.[v]
.

VI

And since writing that last paragraph, we are now in the second year of the War in Ukraine. Many thousands of civilians have been killed in Ukraine. The Russian civilian population is unaffected. But they are most certainly affected in an other way. It is estimated that up to 100,000 Russian troops had been killed by 24 February 2023, the first anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine (Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’). Western Intelligence suggests a much higher figure but I am being deliberately conservative. Even if I take the lower figure of 100,000 deaths, this does not take into account those injured or wounded or taken prisoner, that means that 100,000 Russian families have already been tragically hit by the criminal actions of one man, a man who has no international standing, a man who had become an international pariah by March 2022, and the Russian People, a rogue nation, a pariah state.

Yet, exactly as in Nazi Germany a lifetime ago now, so the Russian people cannot openly express themselves. Eyes and twitching curtains are everywhere. Score-settling abounds. Those who do speak out find that the democracy they thought they lived in is a totalitarian state. One wrong word spreads like ink on litmus, and that person, and that person’s family, disappears.

Chapter Two

I

Keep a handle on history.

Knowledge of our past helps us to steer our course through the future, an exciting, very challenging, very dangerous future as we approach in just nine days’ time the arrival of 2022. These challenges, demands, and unwanted confrontations, equal that of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents; a point firmly emphasised, with great skill, diplomacy and eloquence, by our Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II.

One way is to read novels, keeping in mind that what we are reading might be what the writer has used some well-researched poetic licence. In short, we cannot be certain but we get the gist!

But, I remember too, that war always has two sides to it. Therefore, I must reflect upon the suffering we brought upon former enemies and their civilian populations, ultimately, far greater than our own. This included the thousands of innocent civilians in the occupied countries that the Allies were endeavouring to liberate. Such is total war. Such is what a couple of major powers right now see as an acceptable price if it means the achievement of their goals.

II

The Pandemic now enters a new strain, a new wave, Omicron now outpacing the Delta Variant of Covid at what one presenter today called ‘lightning speed’. This, too, is an international conflict with one marked difference. All of us are united across the globe in dealing with this Pandemic, and deal with it we will! It is also a wake-up call not to allow ourselves to slip back into old ways, old habits, and the ‘I’m alright Jack’ attitude. 


Chapter Three



I

It is very serious when the world’s leading democracy seems to have fallen into its old trap ~ inward-looking, raising drawbridges, closing the ports, letting not anyone in, and anyone who leaves, not letting them back in.

The siege mentality is an understandable reaction. Others call it ‘splendid isolation’. Others, still, call it MAGA - Make America Great Again. What we should not accept is America’s insistence on entering into a blame game. History suggests that a desire to be great again is not always democracy in action. Rather, it is either dictatorship-in-action or tyranny-in-action, or most calamitous of all, both of those actions running parallel and as tightly joined as a carpenter’s dovetail. As MfH 28 has already stated, this is precisely the situation in Myanmar at the hands of Ming Aung Laing.

II

If I had been told in 2015 that in 2020, America will have undermined NATO [vi], the UN [vii] questioned the need for G7 Meetings, and then ridiculed or boycotted the G20 summits or - like a kid in a prom-tantrum - departed early, withdrawn funds from the WHO [viii], repudiated its role in the Middle East and entered into negotiations with the Taliban which are falling apart even before the ink is dry, let alone ratified; played a round of ‘kiss-n-cuddle game’ with Russia, done the same with North Korea, same again with China and then rebuked China for causing the current pandemic, I would have simply said that this was Orwellian thinking, someone wanting to create a vision of hell in order to catch the editor’s eye and guarantee their continuance on the payroll!

We know, of course, that George Orwell did not have that intent in mind.

Orwell saw what was coming, and knew what had caused the problems. He was a visionary.

None of those three epithets can be claimed by the 45th President, although some security and sanity have returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the 46th President. It is not the Intelligence Services that one should be suspicious of. It is how the electorate is playing out. They are saddled with a college electorate that seems not fit for purpose. History will, one day, record events … but that is for the next generation to consider as a Moment from History.


Chapter Four



I

In my village, prior to Covid, the bells peeled every Wednesday and Sunday, and on Saturdays for weddings. The clock in the bell-tower strikes upon the quarter hour. All of this changed, of course, as lockdowns meant that the mechanisms could not be regularly attended, so time inserted its inviolability upon the clock by breaking apart the mechanisms. In December 2021 I hear the clock again, not quite as regularly as before, but certainly, the tower’s Campanology [ix] has returned with enthusiasm and gusto.

In 2020 I wrote that:

‘it was only two days ago that I realised I was missing that reassurance of the chimes on the quarter hour. It reminded me of my family explaining to me, as an infant, how the bells were not rung for six years - which being under six meant that that was forever! We will, one day, hear the chimes again. Life will resume, and it is good to see that some nations are able to ease their lockdown restrictions.’

In the UK we are advised that even with the easing of restrictions, social distancing is, in a phrase, ‘here for the foreseeable future’.

Think of the import of those five words, and the way those five words impact each of us, individually, and we begin to obtain a longer-term view of life for all of us. I grew up with an awareness, not at all comforting, when I’d hear the grown-ups refer to the recent past and “we’re in it for the long haul”, which, again, for me was 6 years and that was longer than my whole life, so that meant, ‘forever!’ Wandering off into the garden to play cowboys and baddies again, I’d be thinking ‘I really don’t like this! Come on Tonto, let’s chase those baddies out a town … round the rose patch, through the two apple trees and down to the hedge at the bottom of the garden and those two tone green coloured wartime prefabs. Mum? Why do prefabs have wheels? Are they bombers in secret waiting to take off? Too many questions, Ken. Toddle off and play.


Chapter Five



I

So, restrictions are eased, but the pandemic is not over. It is now December 23, 2021, so events have overtaken the next five paragraphs . They remain here becausenthey record a moment from history in 2015, and to remind us all of a very unpleasant, dark and sinister moment in history. I leave them here as a warning. God forbid the Quiff be re-elected. The remainder of the English-Speaking Peoples, far larger than even the USA itself, would gather together. America is wise not to see itself as the centre of the English-Speaking Peoples, even though all of us would welcome this. It is not a given. It has to be earned.

“America says at the podium today (23 April 2020) that there is little likelihood of a second wave, only to then have that countermanded by a medical scientist at the same podium a few minutes later.

America, get this loud and clear. Much of the world is in danger of no longer respecting you, and I’m talking of the other great democracies, not your enemies.

Get this too. America, you are in danger of becoming the laughing stock on the world stage, when leaders roll their eyes behind your back as you depart the stage thinking that you’re still the number one nation, still able to hold Democracy together. You are, whether by intent or accident, pulling Democracy apart, smashing multiculturalism, and undermining the need for all of us, world-wide, to work globally. How on earth you managed to find yourself in the position of playing host to an incumbent climate-change denier, God only knows!

When you do these things, you are move closer to nationalism, not that which is pride in one’s country, for all peoples should feel this. But when nationalism is playing tip-toe with populism, then you are playing into the hands of those peculiar self-appointed armed militias you seem to have in some states, and the nationalism of the 1930s that placed three megalomaniacs in power who, between them, caused between a hundred million deaths and the most appalling atrocities in every continent.

That is why you spearheaded NATO and spearheaded the UN. 1933-1945 was damned well not going to happen a third time!”

— Moment from History 12 KTW 2015

“Populism ~ the ‘woke’ term for Fascism. When I ask people what they understand by the noun ‘populism’ they reply, ‘well, it’s what’s the popular thinking of the electorate is’.
Quite a lot of those then seem to go through a turning-stomach-inside-out moment when I suggest they now use the term ‘fascism’.

Evil peered out from the cage ... ‘I won’t bite... just put your finger in...’

Gullibility did just that and in those ebbing dying moments wondered how so much red could come spurting out of so small a severance.”

— Kenneth Thomas Webb 2023

II

Please underline this thought. I am not against America. I believe passionately in American liberal democracy. It is now time for America to pull itself up by the boot-straps, all 328 million. It is doing so. And it is doing so against the backdrop not only of the Pandemic but also the devastation of Typhoons that ripped through the six States of Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee.

In 1940, Britain had quite a problem, made worse by the whisperings into FDR’s ear by telephone direct from London to the Oval Office, by outright taunts and rubbing hands with glee at the prospect that invasion and occupation were a ‘given’ in the dispatches of Joseph Kennedy, the American Ambassador to the Court of St James.

Fortunately, a man saw threw him, and the moment he was asked to form a government by the King, promptly booted that odd-bod back across the Pond. It is said that the two most unpopular people representing their governments in 1940 were Kennedy and Ribbentrop. Ambassador Bullitt in Paris had no time for his American compatriot.

I’ll end by referring again to history.

A great man striding the world stage - half Brit-half American - made a statement that is as true today regarding this Pandemic as it was then in those dark days of 1941.

Now, this is not the end.

It is not even the beginning of the end.

but it is, perhaps,

the end of the beginning. [x]

Chapter Six

Much has happened since this MfH 12 was first published on 1 September 2015.

I must refer to that terrifying expression total war. I speak of the Strategic Air Offensive waged against Nazi Germany. They did indeed reap the whirlwind. One considers the devastation to British cities and towns and ports; then one considers the devastation of Nazi Germany’s cities, towns and ports. Simply, it is not so much a case of comparing as contrasting. Indeed, as the eminent military historian Sir Max Hastings reminds us, following D-Day, Allied Troops had quite a problem coming to terms with the devastation wrought in Germany and the occupied countries by the Royal Air Force, the Commonwealth Air Forces and the United States Army Air Force, a fact that might have been problematic had there been no attempted Final Solution. Any sympathy evaporated. [xi]

Thank goodness the German People came through this, and my many German friends, including those who lived through that terrible time. I write this, too, with one very special lady in mind, Frau Hedi Kraus, who regularly tended the graves - “my boys”- of the Webb Crew DK165 MP-E from 1943 until they were moved to the Rheinberg War Cemetery in 1947.[xii]

We must never let this catastrophe happen again. Whether the world’s current dictators see it quite like that is another matter.

Whether we have the politicians able to cope with the crises looming on the world horizon at this very moment ~ well, I guess, the jury is still out. Make no mistake, though, it IS looming.

5 April 2023
All Rights Reserved


First Published as MfH 12 on 1 September 2015
Republished 23 December 2021

© 2023 Kenneth Thomas Webb

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Footnotes and References

i. The Sinking of the RMS Lusitania

ii. Yorkshire Air Museum

iii. “Richard Eager” A Pilot’s Story

iv. In Liverpool, this amounted to four thousand of that total number

v. Covid Pandemic statistics as at December 21, 2021

vi. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

vii. United Nations

viii. World Health Organisation

ix. Campanology ~ the scientific and musical study of bells. This includes the technology of bells – the method of being founded, tuned, and rung. Campanology also examines the history, methods, and traditions of bellringing as an art. When played together, a set of tuned bells becomes one musical instrument, from a composer’s or musical conductor’s perspective.

x. Winston Churchill at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, November 10, 1942 and by courtesy of The Churchill Society London

xi. Sir Max Hastings in conversation with Arthur Williams, Patron of The People’s Mosquito

xii. Rheinberg War Cemetery, Nordrhein-Westfahlen