My friend Keith Statham wired the message to all and sundry thus mobilising the country’s reserve fighting force

My friend Keith Statham wired the message to all and sundry, thus mobilising the country’s reserve fighting force. Keep rolling.’For an hour we pulled on joints the size of baseball bats, blowing smoke at Karin and Reena, but nothing happened.’This stuff’s rubbish,’ said Sue From The Earl’s Court Road. ‘What was the coded message, then?”Bollards,’ I said – whereupon Karin, the vicar’s Rottweiler, laid her ears back and chased us into the bathroom.’At least we know the word of command,’ I said.’Plus we know it must have been the insecticide made me lose two days in three. I’ll give the brutes a dose.’I filed this while she went to work with the insecticide. When I came out of the bathroom, Reena and Karin were on their backs with their legs in the air, not knowing if it was Wednesday or Christmas.’That’s solved my moral dilemma,’ I said ‘Honest John can stay put.”It’s not a dilemma According to Professor Honderich .”Don’t you start. Where are you going?”To sell the insecticide in Amsterdam,’ said Sue From The Earl’s Court Road.. ONCE the high explosives and small phosphorus bombs with their load of sticky fire had been dropped on the German homes below, there was little time for the seven men cramped in a Lancaster bomber to study the flames, let alone think of women and children burning

They were too busy fighting for their own survival.

At the height of the bombing during the closing stages of the war, only one in three of the Allied crews survived.
No wonder the subject stirs up so many emotions. The morality of a policy of deliberate mass killing of German civilians, last raised in 1992 along with the memorial to Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, Bomber Command’s leader, is about to be debated again.A Canadian documentary, The Valour and the Horror, to be shown on Channel 4 at 7pm tomorrow, re-examines the campaign and questions the terror bombing demanded by the War Cabinet. The programme salutes the bravery of 50,000 Canadian volunteers and their Allied peers, and condemns the operations they were ordered to carry out.In Canada, some former airmen were so angered and distressed by the documentary that they brought an unsuccessful action for defamation against its makers, including Brian McKenna, the director.Next Saturday, at 6.30pm, Right to Reply will offer outraged veterans and military historians who disagree with the film a chance to speak. Michael Floyd, a former British pilot with sympathies on both sides of this painful divide, will be among them.From August 1943, when he was 20, Mr Floyd flew Lancasters on a total of 29 missions. His older brother, also in Bomber Command, died in one of the first mass bombing raids over Cologne.’At night, you didn’t see other planes until they attacked you,’ Mr Floyd says. ‘There were flares and all sorts of coloured lights, gunfire bursts, little clouds floating across the sky And the fires, of course But all pretty distant That was the eerie thing about it You were totally isolated from the conflagration.

It just looked like a fine fireworks display at Battersea Park.’The Lancasters set out at dusk for Germany from 103 Squadron’s north Lincolnshire base The boys who were fortunate returned at dawn ‘There was such a contrast,’ Mr Floyd says. ‘You’d fly back and suddenly you were in the countryside, in the morning, with birds singing and a nice breakfast waiting It was an odd war experience.’Dozens of my friends died. You would have been drinking with them the night before, and then they weren’t there And yet I only saw one body through the whole war. Once the plane was shot up, my rear gunner was killed, and one or two people hurt.’Some of the pilots interviewed in The Valour and the Horror say they thought the raids were directed at industrial targets. Another describes how he realised, slowly and with shock, that the real purpose was to kill civilians Mr Floyd says he knew the truth all along.

‘There was no suggestion that the raids were anything other than indiscriminate,’ he says. ‘Apart from the fact that some of the targets were industrial towns, there was no suggestion of aiming at a particular building, and night bombing wasn’t very accurate anyway.’Despite the concentration on survival and the stresses, excitement and close comradeship of the job, there was still room in Mr Floyd’s mind for reservations about the bombing. Before volunteering from college in 1941, he had been to Germany on holiday and met Germans whom he liked.’My memory of any discussion was that if you suggested there were some good Germans, you were regarded as eccentric, perhaps dangerously so. People felt they were fighting a very nasty enemy and every aspect of the country was evil. I didn’t hold those opinions.’And this almost subhuman species, the German Nazis, had, after all, started it In this climate Bomber Harris received his orders.