Caedo wanted to make the sculptures out of bronze, but there was not enough time or funds to get them ready for the inauguration. He therefore cast them in reinforced concrete and painted them with metallic olive-drab paint. (Today’s bronze statues are a later replacement.) The unveiling was to take place in October 1977, but first there were political hurdles to negotiate. The president’s wife, Imelda Marcos, ordered major changes to the memorial at the last moment. Caedo’s sculpture included a giant landing craft as a backdrop to the seven statues, exactly as the wartime photographs showed; but the First Lady ordered the backdrop torn down, saying that the monument ‘should honour men, not barges’. Caedo, who had spent eight months building this element of the memorial, reportedly burst into tears when it was dismantled.
It was not only Imelda Marcos who took a direct interest in the memorial. Her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, was also heavily involved both in the planning of the monument and in the celebration of it when it was unveiled. In a speech at the inauguration, he made it clear what the memorial was supposed to symbolise: ‘Let this Landing Memorial … be a tribute to the American fighting men who crossed the vast Pacific in fulfilment of a promise to return,’ he said. Furthermore, ‘Let it be a renewal of the Filipino people’s bond of friendship with the people of the United States of America.’
Other public figures of the time expressed similar sentiments. The Filipino foreign minister, Carlos Romulo, emphasised how important the memory of MacArthur was for Filipino–American relations. ‘We owe him a debt of gratitude that we cannot forget,’ he said in an interview in 1981. ‘His name is revered and idolised in the Philippines.’
There was a certain amount of national self-interest in making such statements. During the 1970s, the Philippines was in thrall to American investment, American financial and military aid, and American credit. The country was moreover home to dozens of American military bases, from which US troops dominated the western Pacific and the South China Sea. In such an atmosphere, it certainly made sense to pay tribute to ‘American fighting men’ like MacArthur. Corrupt Filipino officials also had darker reasons to sing America’s praises. Many of them, starting with President Marcos himself, were making a fortune out of bribes from American businesses, or from skimming development aid as it entered the country. The occasional grand gesture towards the USA was probably considered a sound investment.
However, alongside such cynical motivations, there was also a great deal of sincerity. Corrupt or not, Marcos and his administration did not impose the memorial upon his nation: it was always backed by popular sentiment. And probably personal sentiment too: it is impossible to escape the suspicion that government leaders had their own private reasons for wanting to see MacArthur honoured in this way. President Marcos had served under the general during the war, and claimed to have been personally decorated by him (although such claims later turned out to be more than a little exaggerated). Marcos was every bit as narcissistic as MacArthur, and repeatedly tried to wrap himself in the general’s reflected glory. His wife, Imelda, also had a personal interest in the memorial: she had grown up in Leyte, very close to where the landings took place, and had witnessed the liberation first hand. Carlos Romulo, meanwhile, was even closer to MacArthur; so close, in fact, that he himself appears in the monument (he is the helmeted figure standing at the back of the group).
In commissioning this memorial, interfering in its design, and celebrating it so wholeheartedly, those at the centre of government were not only honouring an important moment in Filipino history; nor were they merely acknowledging an important military, political and economic alliance. They were also dramatising one of the most important moments in their own lives.
* * *
Times change. When I first visited the Philippines in 1990, a fresh wind had already begun to blow. Marcos had gone, ousted by a popular uprising in 1986; his government had been revealed as one of the most fantastically corrupt and violent regimes of the post-war era; and a new, democratic government under Cory Aquino had begun investigating his crimes. The whole country was struggling to come to terms with its immediate past.
At the same time, resentment of American power was running high, particularly regarding the presence of American military bases on the islands. US soldiers were no longer regarded as heroes, but as a humiliating imposition upon a sovereign nation. The Filipino press often carried stories about the exploitation of women around the huge air force and naval bases at Angeles City and Subic Bay. The national conversation was all about taking back control from a giant, neo-colonial power.
Anti-Americanism also found its way into academic circles. Several historians, among them the renowned Renato Constantino, had begun to challenge the popular view of the liberation at the end of the Second World War. They claimed that the Philippines had not needed rescuing by outsiders, and that the Filipino resistance had been on the verge of defeating the Japanese on their own. MacArthur was no longer the unequivocal hero he had once been: in some quarters he was regarded as a symbol of continued American imperialism, stepping ashore in Leyte not to liberate the Philippines, but to reclaim it.
Over the following years, successive governments decided to try to commemorate a much more Filipino-focused view of history. New monuments were built, most notably a Filipino Heroes Memorial (inaugurated in 1992) and a monument to the victims of the liberation of Manila (in 1995). In more recent years memorials have even been built to the Hukbalahap – a wartime guerrilla movement that fought against not only the Japanese but also the return of the Americans.
If the Philippines were to follow the same pattern as other countries, the next step would be clear: there would be calls on politicians to shake off their colonial history and tear down the memorial to MacArthur. In one or two other Asian countries something similar has already happened. In South Korea, for example, where MacArthur was long revered as the commander who turned the tide of the Korean War, his statue in Incheon has been the focus of repeated demonstrations against American influence in the country. In 2005, riots broke out around the statue, with protesters calling for it to be torn down.
So far, however, the Filipino people have stopped short of such moves, at least as far as the MacArthur Landing Memorial is concerned. The authorities still treat this monument with great care and respect. When one of the seven statues (that of Carlos Romulo) was toppled by a typhoon in 2013, it was immediately repaired by the government and restored to its position. War veterans and their families continue to visit the memorial every year on 20 October, accompanied by dignitaries from Manila, Washington, Canberra and Tokyo. Down on the beach there are regular re-enactments of the battle, and the nearby city of Tacloban holds an annual Liberation Day parade.
Despite all his faults, and the long-running arguments between historians, MacArthur is still a hero in the Philippines – if only for the single moment when he stepped upon the shore of Leyte. Today the statues in Palo representing him and his aides are a little tarnished by weather and corrosion. They have been soiled by the birds that occasionally land on them. But they stand nevertheless, their eyes focused on the Philippine shore, their faces still a picture of grim determination.
5
UK: Bomber Command Memorial, London
The USSR and the USA were not the only major victors of the Second World War: Britain also belonged to this elite club of heroes. Of the so-called ‘Big Three’, Britain was the only one to have been engaged in the war right from the very start. It therefore holds a special place in Allied history.
Britain’s capital, London, was for many years the epicentre of the Allied war effort. As a consequence, it has become home to dozens of different war memorials devoted to all manner of people and nationalities. There are monuments to the civilians who died in the Blitz, to the city’s firefighters, its railway workers and its air raid wardens. There are large installations dedicated to the Canadian soldiers who fought for Britain, to the Australians, to the New Zealanders and to the soldiers from India and the rest of the British Empire. Every branch of the military seems to have its own monument here, from fighter pilots and tank crews to Gurkhas and Chindits. There are statues of generals, admirals and air marshals. There is even a memorial to the animals that served during the war.
However, one monument in London stands out among all the others. The RAF Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park is one of London’s newest: it was only inaugurated in 2012, long after almost all the others were built. It is also by far the largest Second World War memorial in the city: over 8 metres (26 feet) high and 80 metres (262 feet) long, it is probably twice as big as its nearest rival. But what really makes the memorial unique is its design. Unlike London’s other war monuments, which all stand out in the open, this one is semi-enclosed. It conceals its message inside an elaborate structure of Doric columns and classical balustrades: it looks more like a Greek temple than a war memorial. Inside, taking the place of Mars or Apollo, are the statues of seven airmen, standing in a group as though they have just returned from a mission. It is quite clear from their size, their stance, and the way that each of them gazes confidently into the distance that these men are supposed to be heroes. As you enter the temple-like structure, you are forced to look up at them as if they were objects of worship. Above their heads, the roof is open, so that nothing stands between them and heaven. If ever there were a temple to British heroism, this surely is it.
The Bomber Command Memorial is one of the most important monuments in London, but it is also one of the most problematic. Despite the heroic pose of the statues within, it is not at all clear why these men should be considered heroes. Unlike so many other statues devoted to the war, they are not raising a flag, or wielding a sword, or stepping onto a beach to liberate a nation. In fact, they are not in any kind of dynamic pose at all: they are just standing there. On the wall, carved deep into the stone, is an inscription telling us that 55,573 similar men were killed during the war. But this does not explain their heroic stance either: dying in large numbers like this implies some kind of victimhood, not heroism. On the opposite wall is a quote from Winston Churchill, claiming that ‘the bombers alone provide the means of victory’. But how? And why? What exactly did these men do to win our adulation?
To understand what this memorial is commemorating, you need to know something about the bomber war, and the leading role that Britain took in this type of combat during the Second World War. But to understand why it looks as it does, why it is so much bigger than every other British war memorial, and what it is really trying to say, you need to understand the political atmosphere in the UK at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the forces that led to the building of the monument in the first place.
Britain’s bomber war is one of the most controversial episodes in the country’s recent history. It began with the best of intentions. The British government made a solemn promise to spare civilians wherever possible, and only sent its bombers to strike specific military installations. But bombing specific targets in those days meant getting in close and bombing in broad daylight. In such circumstances the slow bomber planes were easy targets for flak guns and fighter planes: casualties among British aircrews were catastrophic.
So the Royal Air Force changed tactics. It began bombing at night instead, and from higher altitudes. This kept British planes and crews safer, but it also made their bombing far less accurate. According to a government report in 1942, only one in three British bombs landed within five miles of its target.
Far from being Churchill’s ‘means of victory’, therefore, bombing was turning out to be a costly failure. The RAF seemed to be faced with two alternatives, both of them equally hopeless. They could attack in daylight and be shot down, or they could attack by night and miss their targets.
It was at this point that a new commander-in-chief took charge at Bomber Command – a brusque, uncompromising leader named Arthur Harris. It was Harris who championed the idea of a different kind of bombing: to forget about picking out individual military targets, and simply bomb entire cities instead. There was a certain brutal logic to this. If bombing were to work then it would have to be acknowledged as the blunt instrument that it was. By bombing large areas, the RAF could destroy not only the factories and installations that were supplying Germany with arms, but also the homes of the workers who staffed those factories. Killing the workers themselves was part of the plan: in a total war, factory workers were considered a target just as legitimate as the soldiers they supplied.
But Harris went further. By devastating entire cities, he believed that he could break not only the German economy, but also the will of the German people to continue fighting at all. According to this reasoning, shops, restaurants, schools and hospitals were legitimate targets. The purpose was to drive Germany to despair. Thus, ordinary civilians were no longer collateral damage – they had themselves become targets.
Harris knew that he was crossing a moral line, but believed that the ends justified the means: if he could bring an early end to the war, he reasoned, then his brutal policy might end up saving more lives than it took. He was quite open about this, and wanted to enlist the support of the British people. The only reason he did not explain his strategy publicly was that the government prevented him from doing so. Churchill and his cabinet wholeheartedly endorsed the strategy; but they wanted to keep up the pretence that Bomber Command’s targets were always strictly military.
Unfortunately German morale never collapsed as Harris hoped it would. The war dragged on, and city after city in Germany was devastated. According to military historian Richard Overy, some 600,000 civilians were killed beneath Allied bombs, not only in Germany, but also in those countries that the Allies were liberating. It was a horrific death toll, outnumbering the British victims of German bombs by almost ten to one. At the time, however, the British public did not seem to care too much. Every successful bombing was reported in the newspapers with triumphant glee. Bomber crews went on publicity tours of British factories, and the stories they told the workers were invariably greeted with cheers. The loss of German civilian life was deemed a price worth paying.
Towards the end of the war, however, the atmosphere suddenly changed. The turning point was the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. During a press conference after the raid, a senior officer let slip that it had been conducted partly to destroy ‘what is left of German morale’. In the following days, stories began to appear claiming that the British were conducting ‘terror bombing’. Questions were asked in the House of Commons. After the American press got hold of the story, the Royal Air Force was put under considerable international pressure to explain its actions.
It was not long before the British establishment turned its back on the men of Bomber Command. Churchill drafted a memo to his chiefs of staff berating them for indulging in ‘acts of terror and wanton destruction’ (although he toned down his rhetoric in the final version of the memo). The hypocrisy of this memo is really quite something. Churchill had always known what strategy Harris was following, but had never before expressed much concern about it. After the Allied victory in May 1945, Churchill praised every branch of the armed forces in his victory speech – but made almost no mention of Britain’s bombers. In his bestselling memoirs, published after the war, Churchill omitted the bombing of Dresden. It was as if he hoped that the episode could be erased from public memory simply by not talking about it.
Naturally, the men who flew the bombers were quite disoriented by this sudden change of heart. As the official historian of the bomber war, Noble Frankland, put it, ‘Most people were very pleased with Bomber Command during the war and until it was virtually won; then they turned around and said it wasn’t a very nice way to wage war.’
The indignation this caused over the following years cannot be overestimated. I have known and interviewed dozens of British bomber crew, and most of them have spoken bitterly about the way they were shunned by the establishment after 1945. Many were upset that they were never granted their own specific medal, but instead had to make do with a more generic campaign medal that was granted to everyone in the air force. They saw this as yet another way in which their contribution to the war was being discreetly brushed under the carpet. Worse still was the way that they were treated by the general public. During the war, a bomber crewman who walked into a pub in uniform would rarely have to buy his own drinks; but after 1945 he would have to think twice before admitting to what he’d done during the war. In the 1960s especially, when a new generation was questioning the actions of its parents, students sometimes mocked the claims of bomber veterans that they were ‘only following orders’. Right-wing historians like David Irving also drew deliberate, if dubious, parallels between Nazi atrocities and the actions of the RAF. The men of Bomber Command, once heroes, were suddenly being treated as villains.
Eventually this backlash against veterans of the air war fizzled out, and a more nuanced view began to take hold. In the late 1970s, historians like Martin Middlebrook and Max Hastings led the way in rehabilitating the men of Bomber Command in the minds of the public. Since then there have been dozens and dozens of popular histories by authors like Robin Neillands, Mel Rolfe and Kevin Wilson. In the years when I used to work in military publishing I collaborated with many of these authors, and indeed commissioned some of their books myself.
In the 1990s and 2000s a succession of British TV dramas and documentaries about the bomber war brought this nuanced view of history into the mainstream. Viewers of the BBC drama Bomber Harris, or the Channel 4 documentary Reaping the Whirlwind, were invited to put themselves in the shoes of the airmen before making moral judgements. Gradually the British public was learning to come to terms with an uncomfortable history.
Sensing that the public was ready to support them, the Bomber Command Association began in 2009 to campaign for a memorial. They were granted their wish three years later, in the summer of 2012, when the Bomber Command Memorial was finally inaugurated.
Had this been all there was to the story, the Bomber Command Memorial would not have been nearly as interesting, or as problematic, as it is today. It might have ended up resembling some of the memorials to the bomber war in other parts of Britain and Germany. For example, it could have been a monument to reconciliation, like Coventry Cathedral’s ‘Cross of Nails’ (see Chapter 24). It might have been an anti-war sculpture, like the Dammtordamm monument in central Hamburg. At the very least, it might have made a nod to the dark moral choices that Britain was forced to make because of the war. But then a new wave of popular sentiment swept over the issue, making any such nuance almost impossible.
The problems began when the newspapers started to become involved. The Bomber Command Memorial was to be built with private funding, so three daily newspapers – the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express – ran campaigns to raise money. Since these are all newspapers of the political right, the memorial was largely supported by right-wing donors, particularly Lord Ashcroft, the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, who contributed £1 million. The political left, by contrast, were scarcely invited to have a say – and nor, to their shame, did they particularly seem to want one. Thus, what should have been a project that brought people together from across the political spectrum ended up being a highly partisan cause célèbre.
In order to drum up support for the memorial, the three newspapers, especially the Daily Mail, began to publish highly emotive stories about how the men of Bomber Command had been snubbed. Articles began to appear calling them ‘Forgotten Heroes’, or ‘the black sheep of the British popular memory of the Second World War’ – despite the fact that they were neither forgotten, nor any longer regarded as ‘black sheep’. Online rumours began to spread suggesting that the local council was blocking the construction of a memorial because its planners were ashamed of Britain’s bomber crews, or that Germany was putting pressure on the British government to veto the project – stories that had little foundation in truth.
When historians insisted that there should be at least some mention of the controversial aspects of bombing, they were derided as milksops with no sense of national pride. Columnists claimed that the men of Bomber Command were under attack once again, this time by the forces of political correctness. (In the end, the builders of the memorial did agree to add an inscription mentioning ‘those of all nations who lost their lives in the bombing of 1939–1945’. But it was in an awkward position, high up near the roof, and obscured from view by the statue. It was quite obviously an afterthought.)
I watched this happening with a certain amusement, but also with growing incredulity, because I knew from years of research that the vast majority of what was being said was complete nonsense. I was particularly struck by the way that the veterans of Bomber Command were portrayed. The British press always labelled them ‘heroes’, but in fact were depicting them as victims. None of the men I had interviewed over the years felt nearly as sorry for themselves as the newspapers seemed to feel for them. On the whole they had been sensible men, who had long since come to terms with the way they had fought the war and were generally satisfied with the way that British society had belatedly come to accept them. So where was all this indignation coming from?
The truth is that the Bomber Command Memorial, like all the monuments in this book, says at least as much about the society that erected it as it does about the people it supposedly commemorates. There is nothing modern or contemporary about it, like so many of the other recent memorials that stand nearby: this is a monument to nostalgia. Its classical columns and balustrades evoke a bygone era when Britain was still a great colonial power. The architect, Liam O’Connor, made much of the fact that the style of the memorial echoed the façades of the houses opposite – houses that were built at the height of Britain’s imperial splendour. Its size and prominence are the result of a deliberate attempt to create something physically impressive, just as Britain once used to do in the days of Admiral Nelson and Queen Victoria.
The statues, too, are an exercise in nostalgia. Their stance and attitude evoke the stoic heroes of British war films of the 1950s – films like Reach for the Sky and The Dam Busters. These are heroes who don’t have to be seen doing anything dramatic: the drama is all beneath their strong, silent surface. We do not make heroes like this any more.
British people still speak of the Second World War as their ‘finest hour’, but deep down they also understand that it was the end of something. The Second World War cost Britain its empire, its prestige, and its pre-eminent place in the world economy. After 1945, it was no longer the workshop of the world; and it was never again able to dictate world events as it had done during the previous two centuries. Britain was left virtually bankrupt by the war, and was forced for years to rely on financial aid from the USA. No wonder the British feel indignant, snubbed, cheated by history. No wonder they can’t quite make up their minds whether they are heroes or victims.