File talk:Fleet Air Arm attack the battleship Tirpitz.jpg

Those Lanks!

I’m Canadian and my Dad and his brother John signed up for military service in September 1939, right after Churchill declared war on Germany on behalf of Great Britain and her worldwide empire. (Technically, Canadians are still British subjects.) That was a couple years earlier than our American friends, who declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. With characteristic stupidity, Hitler then declared war on the USA, which FDR was hoping would happen, because he sensed the evil of that pagan death cult calling themselves Nazis. Their goal was to enslave the world, and if they were able to conquer Great Britain, the last outpost of democracy in Europe, they would dig in and be very difficult to eradicate.

(I have no beef with the honorable German soldiers in the Wehrmacht, who were fighting for their country, and with honor. Different feelings about those who joined the SS and ruthlessly murdered women and children, along with running all the concentration camps.)

When they signed up, my Dad was 22 and Uncle John was 19. Both of them wanted to fly Spitfires.

My Dad had just graduated from medical school, so his fate was sealed. For the rest of the war he was a battlefield surgeon, near enough to the front lines he ended up patching together as many Germans as he did Allies. It was all the same to the medical core. By the war's end he'd seen it all and later, in private practice, his surgical skills were praised by his medical colleagues.

Uncle John ended up flying Lancasters. Imagine being 19, a novice pilot, captaining the crew of the largest military plane currently in production. By his crew, also just out of boyhood, my uncle was regarded with devotion as their ticket back to safety. He did his full tour and then some.

I am, of course, a Lancaster buff. I was horrified to discover the death rate among Allied bomber crews was 50 percent. Only the crews of the U-boats on the other side had worse odds of survival.

Watching a video of the sinking of the Tirpitz is what prompted me to write this.

Only one plane on the Allied side was able to carry the three 6-ton Tallboy bombs (one per plane) that sank the Tirpitz: the Lancaster. Forget the B-17 or even the B-29. The Lanc had them all beat for capacity and versatility.

So much so, that when the time came to settle up with Japan, the Lanc was the obvious choice to carry Fat Man and Little Boy to their destinations. It could carry either with minimum alterations.

But to the brass in the USAF, no "furrin" bomber was going to change history. The plane had to be as American as the bomb it carried. And so a few B-29s had to be essentially disassembled and then put back together to make room for either of these bombs. They got the job done, and a half-million Allied lives were saved, along with several million Japanese had the Allies been forced to invade the mainland.

Oh, well. If it wasn't for the Yanks, my Dad and his brother might both have ended up in a German prison camp. Or worse.

I am putting myself in the mindset of a crewman on the deck of the Tirpitz, hearing planes approach. This young guy, same age as my uncle and convinced he was on the side that deserved to win, was fed up sitting around and seeing no action. At least this time the sky was clear, so he could see the enemy bombers as well as hear them. And along they came, dozens of fearsome black Lancasters. And they were the last thing he ever saw. Ask not for whom the bell tolls.