E.T.’s Reviews > Europe: An Intimate Journey > Status Update

“..:beside the tarmac as we landed a rustic brass band was playing, in brass-buttoned uniforms, glowing with pleasure, beer and exertion, and led by a bandmaster who turned from his performers to wave us smilingly with his baton, one-two-three, one-two-three, down the steps from our aircraft door.”
Munich airport in the 1950s

I stayed at an old post-house whose previous customers, the landlord told me, had included Napoleon, Ludwig and Hitler.
And which of the three, I asked him, would he most like to have as a guest again?
He did not smile. ‘Alle shit,’ he said.

‘Did the cause of a righteous victory justify the means of murder? Even Winston Churchill had doubts.
Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris during the Second World War, who had unleashed his vast fleets of black thudding aircraft, manned by crews from every country of the old British Empire, to devastate scores of German cities and kill hundreds of thousands of German civilians.’

“…one of the first air raids to hit German soil in the Second World War was mounted in 1940 by the Luftwaffe itself, which mistook Freiburg im Breisgau for Colmar on the other side of the Rhine …”