Pastoral Letter
Dear Friends, November is a time of remembering, and this year we are
remembering the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the Royal Air
Force's 'finest hour'.
It was sheer excitement of flying a Spitfire or a Hurricane in defence of his country that inspired my father to join the RAF in 1940 to train as a pilot. The RAF duly despatched him off to Canada to train, and to his huge dismay there he failed his final solo flight test.
I suppose I owe my very existence to that outcome, because as a fighter pilot he might not have lived to marry my mother, and I might not have been born. As it was he was given the option of becoming a bomb aimer or a navigator and chose the latter, and ended up being based in a Lancaster squadron at Wittering Common airbase just the other side of Six Mile Bottom.
A couple of years ago I took him over to West Wittering to see if we could find the remains of his old base. Something he had often wanted to do, but never quite managed, ever since he was demobbed. I looked at the Ordinance Survey map, and established what I felt was the likely site of the base, and we set off to find it. Not only did we find some of the old hangers, but we found an old blockhouse, and best of all, a memorial to the brave crews of his squadron, who had given their lives in service of their country.
My father was extremely moved to find the memorial, and to relive all the memories that flooded back from his time there, of all those flights over enemy territory that began there all those years ago, and of the pals that didn't come back.
I shall always remember him taking me to the RAF museum in Hendon where he took me inside a Lancaster bomber exhibit, and showed me the cramped stool and desk where he pored over his maps by the faint beam of a tiny lamp, to guide his bomber to its target and safely home.
As we stood side by side, at the memorial to the crews of Wittering Common base, I thought of him setting off in those days, together with all those who took off in fear and dread of what was to come, and those who never returned.
The names of my father's pals will be rightly remembered on Remembrance Sunday, as will all those who gave their lives serving their country in two world wars and in many conflicts since. War is a dreadful thing. The Lancaster bomber helped enormously in the war effort, and has deservedly, become a great source of national pride. Yet, the Lancaster helped to kill many civilians as well as troops in the 2nd world war. One of the raids that my father flew on from West Wittering was the huge raid on Dresden, the impact of which has remained with him ever since. There is no doubt that that, as we have become ever more proficient at designing ever more effective weapons, our capability of destroying each other has hugely increased as well.
It is vital, therefore, that we should always remember the terrible cost of war, as we read out the names on Remembrance Sunday, and hope and pray that one day, as the prophet Isaiah prophesies:-
"They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore." (Isaiah 2:4)
May God bless you all,