Operation Leg – a pilot unlike any other (2020)

In WW2, Admiral Ernest King is reputed to have said "When they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches."

There were a lot of utter assholes and bullies around at that time. There were huge inter department feuds that resulted in many thousands of deaths. Part of why Eisenhower was a good supreme commander was that he could wrangle the assholes into at least not fighting each other!

Bader was also a chief proponent of the Big Wing, essentially flying a shitload of planes together in formation. The Big Wing which is usually considered [1] to have been a worse strategy than the more dynamic, targeted and integrated Dowding System [2] with which it competed.

He might have been a good pilot and a determined escapee, but I don't think history has much else to say in his favour.

[1] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/battle-of-britain-big-wing-wa...

[2] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-the-dowding-system

An extremely capable and heroic man. But also an out-and-out racist who was an unabashed supporter of apartheid Rhodesia. People are complicated.

Ben is unlikely to ever be surpassed as in author in my eyes. I have read most of his books, well listened on Audible during my commutes, and they are all amazing. He quite literally brings history to life for me. His descriptions make you feel like you're there. Prisoners of the Castle is the one I haven't really had interest in but I'll probably get it at some point just to hear them all.

Thoroughly enjoyable book. I read it recently and, having gone to a UK boarding school, the stories about life in Colditz being treated like a high stakes public (posh) boarding school by the British Officers rang very true to me.

Whereas bagging on a dead war hero due to something you read in a book is highly creditable behaviour

Both yes and no are one syllable. Your drawn out drama-incucing style of writing left a huge hanger that makes it unpleasurable.

If it's the famous Great Escape about which the movie was made, only three men who escaped made it to freedom, and just eleven more were recaptured and survived to the end of the war— the rest of the 77 were shot. Of those 14 survivors, most passed away in the 1990s, so if you actually did get to meet one, that's pretty neat!

Certainly the depiction in the movie is that it was absolutely worth it to the men; maybe in practical terms it resulted in greater loss of life than just cooperating with the confinement, but there is value to the spirit in resisting evil that goes beyond the simple imperative to stay alive.

What syllable?

A film was made about his life a few years after the war, which is now something of a classic, if only due to how often it is shown on British Television. It was a flop in the US though.

I don't think that was the rationale. For captured senior/important figures were given all kinds of affordances and gestures made which contrast shockingly with the conditions we know people endured in concentration camps.

For example Senior officers at Colditz often received parcels from home with stuff like cigars, chocolates, and spirits, sometimes through diplomatic agreements with the Red Cross. This was at a time when Germany in general was starving. They also organised theatre productions, orchestras, and even sports events.

I think this is just a relic of a different era and a different code of war - similar to how long before this Naval captains from opposing sides often shared meals after a ship's surrender. It is hard to imagine now.

The older cadre of Luftwaffe officers considered themselves better than other forces, with a generational code of honor/conduct. Their highest award was the Knight's Cross, so the concept of chivalry among peers was at least a thing. Aircrew POW camps were run by grounded/older Luftwaffe officers.

Goring was a WWI ace, Galland was younger so maybe eager to please.

Not so remarkable when you consider that tying up RAF planes and burning their fuel on missions like this reduces their combat capabilities.

Or, sometimes human beings act like human beings, even in a time of war. In addition to the whole notion of "rules of war," there are thousands of examples, but here is a famous one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

> The truces were not unique to the Christmas period and reflected a mood of "live and let live", where infantry close together would stop fighting and fraternise, engaging in conversation. In some sectors, there were occasional ceasefires to allow soldiers to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead comrades; in others, there was a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised or worked in view of the enemy.

People like you and me work at computers all day and start to think like computers and try to use "logic" to explain everything away. Fortunately, there are real people in the real world who are free of our burdens.

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They maybe just forgot the extend of it. Don't forget that many don't even know the difference between the "normal" (already incredibly horrible and vile) concentration camps like Dachau and the pure extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Sobibor. The Brits and Americans only liberated the first kind, and it (mostly) wasn't their citizens who were gassed or shot by Einsatzgruppen.

Also doesn't help that some think it was only done and caused by the SS or Hitler / Himmler / Göring, as if there was no connection with the remaining government, the police or the Reichsbahn, and as if the Wannseekonferenz[1] and Reichskristallnacht[2] had never happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference, also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

It makes the horrible things the Nazis did even more horrifying. It's easy to think of the Nazi regime as a pure, isolated evil, but when articles like this show that there was room for even a little humanity, it makes it clear how many individual choices for evil were made elsewhere every step of the way.

It makes more sense, if you consider that the Nazis did not really wanted to fight the british in the first place, but would have rather fought with them against the communist hordes in the east and the jews in general. Racism in the british empire was pretty established at that time, so it was not an outlandish goal. Hitler was fine with the british empire oversea (white rule) while he ruled the continent..

But luckily the Nazis were really bad at diplomacy.

The reason the two co exist in the same regime is (awfully) that they didn’t consider Jews to be people while they considered the British worthy opponents. It’s horrible and disgusting but if one can wrap their head around the idea that a population can be indoctrinated into believing there are two levels of people (effectively people and not people) then Nazi Germany becomes more … comprehensible. The shockingness of it doesn’t go away though.

I thought Churchill was against the trials because he thought the Nazi leadership should just simply be executed or imprisoned for life without the bother of a trial? Churchill was very much a fan of unsportsmanlike behaviour, the more devious the trick the better in his view.

Humans are complex. If we want to be serious about preventing a re-occurrence of the Holocaust, we should remember that it was carried out by ordinary people like you or me. Even today, many - perhaps most - people will make excuses for any amount of evil as long as it's being done by their side.

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"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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To be clear, I'm personally of the "nazis need to be punched in the face" mindset, but I still love this quote. Life is nuanced and people are complex. Even Solzhenitsyn knew.

As a side-note, you can have a sense of honor, or even consider yourself a good person, and nevertheless murder pregnant women and children as part or your day job. They key is to not consider them as human beings or, alternatively, to consider that you're somehow doing it for their own good, e.g. by saving their soul.

Nazis (and Imperial Japan, and Crusaders, and plenty of others throughout history) made this possible at large scale by spending years of propaganda dehumanizing the "other".

Sadly, we're seeing a trend of doing the same alongside political lines these days. It's not yet as bad as Mein Kampf, but it's very, very worrying.

There’s probably some truth that many normal soldiers fighting for nazi germany were not aware of the full extent of the horrors at the time. I suspect many just ignored the evidence and believed they were in a traditional war like 1914, or colonial wars of the late 19th century.

Certainly when Germans were shown the concentration camps after the war they wouldn’t believe the evidence in front of them. They didn’t want to think about it during the war either.

Theres no excuse now of course.

It’s sickening that with the increased support of the far right across the west being so apparent today, that it’s the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz today.

If you get bitten by flying bug, that's it. No escape.

I would love to live a carbon-neutral live, but giving up on flying - no way. An easy choice compared to those at war.

Bader willingly reentered the airforce, putting his life at risk, just to be able to fly.

On the German side, to get to fly at least prentend to be a Nazi. Without that, no flying.

Sacrifices have to be made to get airborn.

People are different from person to person and are complex and make different / sometimes even conflicting choices.

We see this when it comes to "meeting your heroes" too.

The "soldier's honour" normally came from the Wehrmacht, professional army officers & soldiers who were very different (and considered themselves very different) to the SS divisions whose leadership were little more than Nazi sadists.

“Germany“ in the larger sense were the bad guys. And in the top ranks of the party there plenty of individuals who were definitely evil. But the regular military - from the foot soldier up to the generals - were just regular people fighting a war. They were no more or less cruel or honorable than their British counterparts.

Remember that the holocaust only started 3 years into the war (after this operation) and its extend was not widely known on either side of the war; and any country takes great care that any war they are engaged in is framed as a just cause