Letter: No vitriol from the bombed

AIR MARSHAL Sir John Curtiss (Letters, 14 August), in an otherwise soundly argued riposte to Geoffrey Wheatcroft's article 'Firestorms darken our past' (7 August), speculates on the attitude of the people of blitzed Britain to the carnage created by the bombing offensives at the end of the last war on major German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden.

I can tell Sir John that the attitude might surprise him. My family was bombed out of our home on the dockside in Liverpool. The family never really recovered from the dislocation. The community which had been built up over the previous 100 years was smashed and dispersed by the airborne assault of the Luftwaffe. However, never once as a child did I hear the type of vitriolic comment which I believe certain sections of British society expected from the working people who suffered so badly. On the contrary, I was brought up to remember the terrible sufferings of the German people, in Dresden in particular. The terrors of blanket bombing enabled us to sympathise with them all the more. Imagining the suffering of others, particularly those innocent of the heinous crimes of the Third Reich, enabled me as a young man to empathise with the German people.

It is no accident therefore that a whole generation of Liverpool musicians travelled to Hamburg to create a commercial and musical revolution from which Britain has benefited ever since.

Sir John, have you heard, two wrongs don't make a right?

Gerald Murphy

Aigburth, Liverpool