RAF Eyes to the Skies Website

Eyes to the Skies

Introduction

IN THE BLOG (Journal) I have already mentioned building a second website to be devoted entirely to Aviation, more particularly to the Royal Air Force. There will also be a platform on that website devoted to the Royal Flying Corps, its predecessor.

The article that follows was originally published as RAF 16 ~ New Fearure two years ago, and proves how unwise I am to let the grass grow under my feet. At the time of writing, I had no thoughts about a second website.

The Aviation Website

Now, well underway, the forthcoming Website makes good progress to launch in April 2023

RAF 16 ~ New Feature used to read as follows

I

THE POPULARITY of the Royal Air Force articles encourages me to arrange them as a separate feature, immediately accessible, on the website’s banner on the home-page.

I thank all of you for the very kind comments, both through social media, and privately.

Just hover over ‘feature’ and we then proceed direct to the Royal Air Force (RAF).

Visitors can, of course, still find them in their usual place.

II

It thrills me that the Royal Air Force and the German Air Force undertake combined offensive operations against, for example, Daesh, but also maintaining the integrity of Estonia in NATO’s [i] task to safeguard the Baltic States.

I look back, often, at archival notes by my uncles, as well as those of notes by a former enemy and know that these are what the ordinary-thinking person soberly looks to, at the height of war, despite that war being vigorously prosecuted by dictators, politicians, military commanders, oblivious to the horror of millions of lives affected, and lost, around them in battlefield areas. Projectiles - any form of weaponry - does not differentiate between the innocent and the guilty, the civilian and the person in uniform.

We have only to look at Syria today to see this being demonstrated, with none of the lessons being learned from World War II, or the wars that then followed on in Korea, Vietnam, the Balkans, Iraq twice over, and Afghanistan.

III

I am looking also at various aspects of the wartime Luftwaffe, not least because I am fascinated with the history of the development of the ME262 Jet, and which has been ignited afresh when looking at the Pilot's Log Book by gracious permission of the niece of Flight Lieutenant Leslie Payne RCAF, the skipper of the Payne Crew on Avro Lancaster PB 402 LQ-M on which my maternal uncle FS Harry Marshall RAF was Flt Lt Payne’s flight engineer.

Les records three entries on three separate operations where he notes sightings by himself and his crew.

There are various views about whether the ME 262 was ever operational.

Many say crews saw what they wished to see. I am of great patience. Equally, I am impatient of theorem leading to conspiracy.

If my squadron has seen something, then until I have contrary evidence, my squadron has my support.

That was always my principle in service, honed on the anvil of an exciting but far distant police career in 1970-1981. But that anvil became the work-site of what I like to think as technical legal engineering, when I entered the legal profession in 1982 and qualified as a junior lawyer [ii] five long years later in 1987. Fortunately, despite the loss of my police career through health, by providence, some say, I retained my RAF career and this carried me through those five years and way beyond, and kept my eye on the ball.

In law, I learned the golden evidential rule. Namely, if the evidence is contemporaneous then it attracts the court's attention and the possibility - probability, even - that the Presiding Judge will pay especial attention to its credibility. As a constable years earlier, many’s the time standing in the witness box it went something like this …

… and are those notes made at the scene PC Webb, or as soon after as possible?

At the scene Your Worships …or… immediately upon returning to the station an hour afterwards Your Worships …

The Magistrates would look inward and either side, whispered nods, then the Chairman would look up …

Very well, Constable, you may refer to your pocket book.

Thank you Ma’am.

That, one might imagine, is a whole different ball-game at the Crown Court, now confronted by bewigged barristers-at law in long black gowns and a Judge of the High Court in Scarlet, Purple sash and long-bewigged.

Judges and QCs [ii] (now KCs) have a tendency to speak very softly … yet every word is delivered with the force of a missile or, as one of my colleagues once put a barrister’s understatement during cross-examination … “like a ruddy bouncing bomb!”

And did the dam burst?

He didn’t reply. But we did, later that month, receive further instruction in the form of a Temporary General Order upon the subject of due diligence in making contemporaneous notes.

IV

My current approach is underpinned as I read afresh the Memoir [iii] of the Luftwaffe Major-General Adolf Galland, the General Officer Commanding the ME 262 Squadron, which suggests otherwise.

My Generation - British and German - grew up in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

I look at images of the United Kingdom at that time. Not good. Not good at all. Then I look at images of Germany. My immediate reaction is

erschreckend! | terrifying!

V

I prefer steering clear of studies that insist I accept that the entire city of Hamburg was consumed by a firestorm rather than the very significant part of it that was caught in that maelstrom; or that Dresden was simply the whim of a vengeful man. If I look at Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin, I then look at the very long list of cities and towns that my mother’s brother was involved in, in making a path to those targets for the bomber streams following them. It makes for very uncomfortable reading. Thus, to this day, I am very aware, when I am looking at my map of Germany because of all my German friends, that terrible acts were visited upon the people.

If I write only from today’s perspective I accidentally throw a historial frisbee But I insist on seeing it with that period’s perspective. The moment we attempt to apply modern perspective to history, we will begin to receive a distorted vision. This will always be so.

VI

That is one of the reasons I find Galland’s biography and his observations - published just eight years after the war’s end - as having that mark of contemporaneous observation.

It seems to me that at the very same time that Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris was writing his memoir entitled Strategic Air Offensive, and published in 1947, Major-General Galland saw a very clear need to present the Axis view. Except that Galland writes with a freshness that demonstrates, to me at least, a soldier and an airman who was not enamoured of ‘The Party’ and was a severe critic throughout the war of the German Air Force high command and, similarly, the politicians and Gauleiters.

Reading Harris’s memoir prompted me to go deeper because I had met him in 1982. I have written elsewhere on the RAF platform about that.

There is, therefore, a later publication of his memoir entitled Bomber Harris : Sir Arthur Harris’ Despatch on War Operations 1942-1945 compiled by John Grehen and Martin Mace, published by Pen & Sword Aviation in 2014.

This enables me to see Harris’s central aim, the thrust of his tenure as commander-in-chief of RAF Bomber Command and to see how he worked with the Generals commanding the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) now the United States Air Force (USAF) - men such as Generals Arnold, Spaatz, Dixon and Eaker.

This became essential to understand, when I commenced studying James Holland’s acclaimed Work Big Week. I had, at first, thought I would be reading exclusively about the USAAF and ‘The Mighty Eighth’ based largely in English counties because of the close proximity to the North Sea and Occupied Europe. I soon discovered that James Holland was equally intent on writing extensively about RAF Bomber Command, the interaction between the Air Officers Commanding of both the RAF and USAAF, and the respect that grew, each for the others’ work. That is no mean feat to achieve in total war. That mutual respect remains in place to this day.

Reading all of these works, I then realised that, for me, they were heralded by having earlier read The War Diaries of Field Marshal Viscount Allenbrooke 1939-1946. The footnote below from Wikipedia I can certainly vounchsafe. [v]

Overall, this research enables me to obtain a grasp of what the nation was asked to do, and what the civil population expected of the men and women of its Royal Air Force and of the Air Transport Auxiliary. Reader, never underestimate the role of Women.

VII

We must all continue this research in our own way. It is as important as when we find that researching our families in the 19th Century and leading up to, and including, what became The Great War.

I remember asking all four grandparents what they felt like when they realised that this ‘olden-days name’ would soon become The First World War.

Talk about Boys’ Own World ! I was every family’s ‘dennis the menace’. But hey ho. Life went on. Both grandfathers had fought in the First World War, the maternal being captured but losing his two brothers; one in the same POW Camp in October 1918; the other brother, we still have not found him. Maternal G’s son was lost 27 years later over Germany; paternal G’s son, likewise, same place 25 years later.

VIII

Both grandfathers understood each other’s pain in losing their sons in the RAF in the Second World War. I was very young, but there was something mystical about them when the family was gathered. Countless families the world over, in every generation, will understand precisely what I mean. Then suddenly, in 1961 Grandad Webb, too, was gone.

But their message was always clear and it went something like this:

That Quiet Wisdom

We do not forget, no words can alleviate how we feel, but we now strive to rebuild this shattered world.

We also build bridges, Ken.

And we cannot keep wondering ‘if only, or ‘what if?’

And as I mentioned in Lachen Speyerdorf at the Memorial Site, Grandma Webb one day clearly touched the rudder when talking about Ken Webb Senior - after whom I am named - Ken, you must remember that not all Germans were Nazis, and I remember as if but yesterday, standing there in short trousers and noting the emphasis Grandma placed on the verb ‘not’.

Yes, Grandma, thank you. That was in 1965. I’d just had my twelfth birthday. Then, just weeks before becoming a teenager Grandma Webb was gone.

IX

“Our Boys” - I’m now quoting my mum who used that phrase throughout life to refer to the Royal Air Force and in particular to the four commands that, through ‘Our Boys’, Mum was so familiar :

Bomber Command

Fighter Command

Coastal Command

The Path Finder Force

… and the last my mum always rounded neatly off, and with a slight punch of the air - even as late as 2016 - the Elite, Ken!

Reader, permit me this last note. It pertains to “Our Boys”. I’ve written elsewhere about Lachen Speyerdorf. Each week, sometimes more frequently, a little girl would place flowers on the graves of six airmen in the local churchyard between 1943 - 1947. After the War the bodies were moved to Rheinberg Cemetery near Düsseldorf in the Rhein-Ruhr. I mentioned my Grandmother. The other point Grandma frequently made, Remember, Ken, the Crew were buried with full military honours by the Luftwaffe. That brought immeasurable comfort to the family. I wonder on the reaction had they known about Frau Hedi Kraus during those terrifying years. But here’s the thing. Each year, Hedi receives flowers, and this is a very personal gift to her “von meinem Jungs” | “from my boys”. I speak of the Crew of Halifax DK165 MP-E. Again, this is well documented elsewhere.

TODAY

The War in Ukraine is in its second year. This is a long war. Thousands upon thousands have already been killed, and all because of the actions of one man against whom lies an International Arrest Warrant for allged War Crimes. Nothing changes. Sometimes, people say to me that if we were to disband our armed forces cmpetely, then at least we would be safe, because we would be seen as people who are not in opposition. Human Nature though tells us that if you lower your gard or disband your guard, you will soon know violent occupation. These islands have a long record on that score.

“If you wish for peace, you must prepare for war.”

— Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus. 4th Century AD (CE)

29 March 2023
All Rights Reserved

© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2023
© Eyes to the Skies 2023

[i] North Atlantic Treaty Organization whose principle is rests upon the premise : An Attack on One member State is deemed an attack on all the NATO Member States. It goes without saying, but needs, nonetheless to be emphasised afresh, not since the Cold War has this been so vitally important to our collective safety and wellbeing

[ii] Queen’s Counsel (KC King’s Counsel)

[iii] Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives (now the Institute of Chartered Institute of Legal Executives). Readers might be interested in this separate article here.

[iv] The First and the Last by Adolf Galland (first published in German in 1953 and republished in English in 1955), and remains a standard authority on the history of the German Air Force

[v] Field Marshal Alan Francis Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke, KG, GCB, OM, GCVO, DSO & Bar (23 July 1883 – 17 June 1963), was a senior officer of the British Army. He was Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the British Army, during the Second World War, and was promoted to field marshal on 1 January 1944.[4] As chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Brooke was the foremost military advisor to Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, and had the role of co-ordinator of the British military efforts in the Allies' victory in 1945. After retiring from the British Army, he served as Lord High Constable of England during the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. His war diaries attracted attention for their criticism of Churchill and for Brooke's forthright views on other leading figures of the war. (This entry is by kind courtesy of Wikipedia, to which I subscribe financially each month).