Salut!

War, flying machines and French connections (2)

Philip Howells, in a guest contribution, offers some further thoughts on wartime aviation mishaps following the Salut! piece juxtaposing reflections on two such incidents in France .....

The item at Salut! arrived at a most apposite moment for a number of reasons,
all of which bear on the search by Jeremy Robson for information on his
Lancaster crew. Since this is likely to be rather long I send it direct and
leave it to you to decide what, if any, of it to place on Salut.

One thing that making the video programme you referred to (since shown on Arte
and available, in French only at present, at the Espace York Mallory - the
museum that the good people of le Rivier have opened in honour of Leigh-Mallory)
is that time is passing very quickly and we are losing the source material.

War, flying machines and French connections (1)

Thursday, Sept 3. The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of war falls this week. Thoughts turn to the immense human sacrifice: military personnel lost in action on ground at sea, in the air; the millions who perished as part of Hitler's "final solution"; the vast numbers of non-combatants who were killed in their homes or public places as bombs fell.

There were more mundane losses, too. Some men and women serving in the Allied forces - forgive me for being more ambivalent about the enemy, though I do think of them as well - sometimes met cruel fates through accident.