I also hate that mentality, especially as it seems like those people forget that we did more damage than the germans did in the blitz and yet somehow people forget about that.
IT WAS DONE
FOR THE GREATER GOOD Joking aside, you're exactly right - wars tend to be nasty business where people die, and both sides usually tend to do unsavoury things.
But history should be appreciated for what it is. And while we all admire these pieces of aviation history, both from aesthetic and technological point of view, I think it's a good thing to remember that these things of beauty were intended to unleash destruction upon their enemies, and that applies to aircraft flown by all factions in any war ever. In my opinion, the quoted comment from Neville of Norwich belies some pretty shocking hypocrisy - I have no doubt he has no trouble admiring Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters, Mustangs or other Allied aircraft.
It's unfortunate that in many countries, the history education has failed to provide an impartial view on the events and reasons of second world war. In some countries, the difficult topics have been largely suppressed, in some countries there's been an uncomfortable "cloak of blame" upon whole generations after WW2. In Germany for example, there seems to have been a significant amount of trying to avoid ANY association to Nazis whatsoever, in fear of being blamed of collecting "nazi memorabilia", even if were simply for academic interest. Indeed, I would not be surprised if many German people actually shared the same opinion as Neville of Norwich - many people seem to think that anything related to Germans deserves to stay buried...
In Japan, the situation is in many ways even worse; in many ways, the atrocities committed by Japanese military in their occupation of the Far East countries has been pretty much silenced and not spoken of in their history education. In addition, because of the way the war ended, Japan ended up cast more as a victim than villain. In some ways it is the opposite of German attitudes; many Japanese seem to think that Japan didn't start the war, and that the occupation of Far East was not in fact an occupation but rather liberation from colonial rule. It's pretty messed up, but I can't really blame them because the schools don't properly teach about the subject.
And the less is spoken of Russian depiction of WW2 history, the better. It is a fairly disgusting glorification of Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War, and that perspective colours everything in it. To be fair, though, the historical revisionism did slightly abate after the collapse of Soviet Union, but recently the same thing has reared its ugly head again and it's actually fairly troubling in some respects.
That said, everyone's perspective of these things is different. The facts may be the same, but the interpretation of reasons and motivations behind them seems to change from country to country, and decade to decade. My own perspective is probably significantly coloured by the fact that I'm a Finnish citizen...
But that's enough of my ramblings. Did the recovery team manage to successfully raise the wreckage? Was the airframe intact or did they have to lift it in parts?
Author
Topic: Recovery of Do-17 (Read 2301 times)
