Youngest Battle of Britain RAF Spitfire pilot Geoffrey Wellum dies

[Nick Walker]

Geoffrey Wellum recalls the RAF's 'finest hour' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-44895703

[Rob C]

The young and the brave. We owe them.

I sometimes think of those poor guys, pulled along in huge gliders, behind lumbering aircraft... how many ever came back, or even landed under control or alive? I must have been six or seven years old, watching them fly over where we lived at the time, not far from Northolt. I guess that's another reason I like Bailey. He feared for Bambi; I watched the glow of flames on the clouds, further down south in actual London.

Who won what, at the end of if all? Seems so pointless today, and I really wonder whether a Nazi victory would really have guaranteed the survival of that regime post-Adolf. Nothing is really cut and dried along roads not travelled.

[Jim Metzger]

Rob,

Survival of the regime who knows, but a LOT more people would have died horrible deaths over a very long period of time.

[Rob C]

Rob,

Survival of the regime who knows, but a LOT more people would have died horrible deaths over a very long period of time.

A lot of people also died fighting the regime.

I in no way defend it (the regime); I simply wonder sometimes whether the battle was pyrrhic or not, looked at dispassionately from a numbers persepective.

Does one draw a disinction between deaths within a persecuted race, and the numerical score of deaths amongst other people not of that race but equally dead because of the conflict? Is there a morality in numbers? Does collateral damage count as acceptable but targetted damage not?

In modern times, looking at Syria gives rise to a similar question of relative tolls.

There is so much about human thinking and action that creates as many questions as it provides logical answers, and even logic, I guess, is inevitably a subjective call.