What do you feel about Sir Patrick's alleged comments? www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... anc-e.html

What do you feel about Sir Patrick's alleged comments? www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... anc-e.html

I feel I'm not going to click on a Daily HateMail link.

My grandad felt the same, but we have to remember what they went through. One of my teachers at junior school had been held POW by the Japanese for 3 years and suffered appalling torture and starvation, he had lost the use of one lung, he absolutely hated the Japanese with a passion and told us so in class. I wouldn't be quick to judge those that have suffered things we can only see in movies, to them its like it was yesterday.

His trouser waist band is chafing under his armpits and that's making the old lad grumpy.

I agree with this, I recall a family holiday in Brittany we had when I was a teenager in the early 1970s, as British people the locals couldn't have been friendleir and the bar that myd ad used to take us in every night was run by a Breton who had escaped to London at the start of the war and joined de Gaulles Free French Army, he parachuted back into France on D-Day (apparently).

Later on in the first week of our holiday three German lads arrived on the camp site as as my father tended to be one of those annoying blokes who organised everyone he got them to play football with us during the day then invited them into the bar in the evening - the bar owner refused to serve them at all and physically threw them out even though they were only 18 years old and not even born at the end of the war - he would eventually serve them after some persuasion that he'd lose his English customers too but only if someone else went to the bar for them, he wouldn't be seen fraternising with Germans nearly 30 years after the war ended but then again Brittany was occupied and heavily fortified by the German Army for four years but even my dad, who'd been in Africa and India during the war (not in any combat situations, lucky sod) was surprised by the stregth of feeling against what were just young lads.

I am glad a consensus is developing that he's entitled to his strong opinions, based on his his personal, life experiences.

Should such understanding extend to other matters perhaps?

The rise on those pants is greater than most people's inside leg

It must have been so awful and upsetting for him to lose his fiancee to a German bomb so I can't blame him for his belief.

His fiancee died in 1943, I wonder how many German civilians his bombs killed prior to that?

Indeed, but why was he bombing Germany? There's a big difference in that neither he nor the English were bent on invading the place. We didn't start it, and given available defences I'm not sure what else you'd expect an RAF man to do.

I presume he would understand it if a German murdered him now, given the terrible death toll caused in the British firebombing of Dresden, the only good Briton is a dead one.

Just to be pedantic, I am sure that Germany didn't declare war on the British Empire. I am pretty sure we claimed we declared war on Germany to pprotect the independence of Poland.

Didn't achieve that, did we?

Major fail.

Spot on.
Britain could have bombed the railway lines that led to the Nazi death camps and saved millions of lives.
It chose to unleash a wave of bombing terror on civilians instead.

I can understand Moore's bitterness, but this is not an excuse for his Little England bigotry, which ATEOTD is merely a mirror image of some of the worst nationalistic ravings of the Nazis themselves. Moore's comments are also an insult to hundreds of thousands of Germans who opposed Hitler and paid for that with their lives.

If his fiancee had been killed by a greengrocer in 1940 would he now be waging war on employees of Tesco and Asda?

But once he'd done it, he's hardly in a position to moan about it happening in return

Quote ="Dally"What do you feel about Sir Patrick's alleged comments? www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... anc-e.html'" Yay, more tea and kittens

Quote ="Dally"What do you feel about Sir Patrick's alleged comments? www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... anc-e.html'" Yay, more tea and kittens

He's entitled to his view, as I am mine. Difference is I don't get a national newspaper publishing mine

It's just the same mentality as a terrorist.

People over here condemn the Taleban and terrorists etc but if one of your family was killed as 'collateral damage' from an RAF or American bombing raid then wouldn't you be justified getting some retaliation on Western civilians or at the very least taking down some squaddies with an IED?

Are you trying to say you're a nobody?

Another difference is that he has given a view on this subject, and you haven't.

Gangsta 'e ain't.

That's one long zip on the fly.

I'm keeping my powder dry...

Acoording to Moore's (lack of) logic, certainly.

As in any conflict, a devastating personal loss will impact far, far more than anything else.

I know many thousands have died in Afghanistan, but all the empathy and understanding in the world means nothing to me compared to the death of a family member or loved one.

Britain could not have 'bombed the railway lines'. Accurate bombing was all but impossible, hence the use of huge scale carpet bombing. Even with a direct hit the largest bomb would only remove a few metres of a section of track and an amount of soil. That could be replaced and fixed in a day. Bombing the railway infrastructure as part of a wider campaign was effective, but as a standalone tactic? Pointless.

Britain only chose to attack Germany cities as a retaliatory tactic following the (accidental) bombing of London in 1940. However, things soon deteriorated into a tit-for-tat campaign and cities became fair game, even though figures in both governments questioned the tactic throughout. In the wider scale of things, you cannot ignore the fact Germany was inflicting massive death and suffering in Europe and threatened the same of Britain. Britain was compelled to go on the offensive and show aggression in the name of destroying Germany, and if that meant playing dirty then so be it.

21st Century sensitivities have no real place in judging WW2 issues of morality.


A completely moot point. Poland was nothing more than the centre of an attempt to get tough with Hitler, who admired and even feared the British, envied the British Empire and knew they would be a formidable enemy. Even Chamberlain knew Hitler wouldn't stop unless opposed. Given the events on the continent, war was inevitable.

Seriously, was there any other option?

As for Patrick Moore, if someone can't understand why the death of his clearly much-loved fiancee at the hands of an unwanted enemy he was already fighting and losing friends to, they're an idiot. I knew old fellas who despised Germans and Japanese for the same reasons MF gave. Many of the older generations felt this way, and quite understandably.
Allow him his views. While they have little place in today's society, they are entirely relevant to his personal experiences.

Agree with most of what Cronus said - including debunking the myth that the Allies could somehow have stopped the mass murders in the concentration camps by bombing the railways. I suspect the Allies wished they had tried to do far more once the true horror of the camps was revealed, but the technology available in WW2 really wasn't capable of stopping it from afar.

As for Moore, why is it at all shocking that he should carry an intense dislike based on losing someone he loved to a violent death? I'm sure there are many Germans who have similar feelings. Some people stop feeling hatred, others never get over those sort of events. Unless you have personal experience I suspect its very difficult for anyone to predict how they'd react.

It's not shocking, it's fooking irrelevant but typical of the Wail to pick up on it and make a story from it. Would they make great mention of Simon Wiesenthal's love of astronomy, in a piece about his life's work?