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By Root 1113 0

Western Allies were bitterly disappointed in 1945, when the support of the Red Army enabled Tito to secure control of Yugoslavia. The German invasion had unleashed domestic forces that the Anglo-Americans proved powerless to control. Even if they had denied arms to Tito, the Red Army’s arrival in 1944 would have ensured that a communist regime was installed in Belgrade. Tito was one of the major figures of the war: he exploited Allied support with notable diplomatic skill, and secured lifelong mastery of his country. But his claims to have played an important part in overthrowing Nazi tyranny are more questionable. Yugoslav partisans were the most numerous and pestilent of the insects buzzing about the open wounds of the Axis in its decay, but their role was slight alongside that of the Allied armies.

War in the Sky

1 BOMBERS

Young men of all nations perceived romance in playing their parts in the war as knights of the air. ‘I saw myself as something like a gladiator of old,’ wrote Ted Bone, who in 1941 became a nineteen-year-old volunteer for RAF aircrew service. ‘Not for me the horrors of hand-to-hand combat with a rifle and bayonet – I would be firing at another fighter plane.’ Young men of ‘the Lindbergh generation’ exulted in the notion of flying fast and nimble single-engined, single-seat aircraft, which granted pilots a power over their own destinies unusual among twentieth-century warriors. It was ironic, therefore, that many such dreamers found themselves instead committed to aerial bombardment of cities, one of the more barbarous features of the conflict; Bone himself became a Lancaster gunner. Bombing killed well over a million people in Europe and Asia, including many women and children. Some of the bravest, best-educated and most highly trained scions of their societies became rivals in a struggle to devastate their enemies’ centres of civilisation.

Neither they nor their commanders saw the mission in such terms, of course. Aircrew thought not of victims on the ground, unconsidered because rarely visible, but instead about their own destinies above. In exchange for a passage to the sky, they accepted an enhanced risk of death, as well as a responsibility to shoot, bomb and strafe. Geoff Wellum, who flew a Spitfire for the first time as an eighteen-year-old on the eve of the Battle of Britain, described the sensation: ‘I experience an exhilaration that I cannot recall ever having felt before. It’s like one of those wonderful dreams, a Peter Pan sort of dream. The whole thing feels unreal … What a pity … that an aeroplane that can impart such a glorious feeling of sheer joy and beauty has got to be used to fight somebody.’

New Yorker Harold Dorfman, who survived a tour as a B-24 navigator over Germany, said later: ‘I would not trade the experience for anything in the world.’ At a USAAF base in England Corporal Ira Wells, a B-24 gunner, read accounts of ground fighting and thought with pity of Allied soldiers: ‘We had all the glory. I realised how fortunate we were to be in the air. I was more frightened in London during the V2 rocket attacks than in the air on missions.’ Dorfman and Wells were relatively unusual, because few bomber aircrew enjoyed their work in the way that many fighter pilots did. This was not because they agonised 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. They were denied the thrill of throwing a high-performance fighter across the sky. The monotony of bombing missions was shattered only when crews encountered the hellish sights and sounds of combat and bomb runs over the cities of Germany or Japan.

Although Laurie Stockwell was a sensitive young Englishman, it never occurred to him to question the ethics of his own part, as a pilot, in bombing Germany. Like almost all his kind, he simply saw himself performing, without fervour,