The glory that was
Have we handled well the wonderful legacy that our forebears left us? I doubt it. I had an uncle, the beloved Freddie Ray, die in a bomber raid over Germany in WW2. I wonder what he would think of what we have done with the results of his sacrifice? I am sure that he would be shocked at many things if he could come back and see what has become of us today
“To the exact minute, the throb of the Merlin engine turned into a roar and swept arguably the most famous warplane of all time back into the air - precisely 70 years since its immortal silhouette first reached for the sky. This time it was a twin-seater, a far-reaching development of the original Spitfire fighter, but the memory it evoked was of a cold March day at Eastleigh airport with a strong wind, as ever, blowing off the Solent.
Then the F.37/34 prototype, yet to receive its evocative name, was unpainted and bare of any sophistication and watched by a couple of dozen people, mostly employees of Supermarine, the manufacturer, and colleagues of the great R J Mitchell, the aircraft’s designer.
Yesterday, hundreds watched at what is now called Southampton airport and thousands more at the city’s Mayflower Park, as the twin-seater, a Mk IX in the livery of the Irish Air Corps, was gunned into the air by its pilot John Romain, with his very special passenger. Alex Henshaw, 93, was the chief test pilot for the Spitfire through most of its many development marks and was revisiting the airport where, on his birthday in November 1939, he first flew the plane. “It is very nostalgic for me returning to Eastleigh,” he said. “This is the most wonderful aircraft, a true thoroughbred and, really, I have never flown another plane of its type that was anything like as good.”
Although the Hawker Hurricane shot down more planes during the Battle of Britain, the Spitfire was the plane that won the affection of the grateful nation. There is still something in its pointed, elliptical wings, its patrician nose cone and, in particular, the energetic chuntering noise of its Merlin engine ripping through the air in a way mimicked by schoolboys for half a century, that causes ripples of emotion.
Among the crowds was Gordon Mitchell, the designer’s son. He has led a campaign for posthumous recognition for his father, who died aged 42 the year after the first test flight of his best-known creation.... “
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JJR-Great article;a bit of history most will not recognize-sad because the present generation has no concept of what our fathers and uncles endured.Sad because our present generation could not produce the same caliber of nationlists who hold country and culture unassailable.I am called a dinosaur by my wife[and others],because I believe in freedom-I erroneously thought I was fighting in VN for principle,only to find I was a pirah.My children are lost in the wasteland of present-day society-I wish better for my grandchildren.
Interesting that Mr. Ray talks about his uncle, a hero who died fighting the Nazis, yet in the post above this Mr. Nueke sounds like he is talking the straight Nazi line on race. What would Uncle Freddie think of this?
Posted by who on Tuesday, March 7, 2006 at 01:04 PM | #
Hmm, who, I wonder what Freddie would think about - if he were alive today - not being able to walk around South Asian “no go zones for whites” without getting assaulted.
And about children not being allowed to recite “baa baa black sheep” for fear of offending the favored ethnics?
And about an English politician put on trial for making a speech critical of Islam?
One may think Freddie would be embracing Nuenke’s ideas ASAP.
Englishmen did not go to war so that they can be race replaced, and made into second-class citizens in their own nation.
If they would have been told their future on June 6, 1944, they would have turned around the boats and headed back across the channel.
Posted by slinker, sailer, toldya, sly on Tuesday, March 7, 2006 at 01:57 PM | #
Two of the first RAF crew members killed on active service had been members of Oswald Mosley’s British Union, in the Wilhelmshaven raid of September 4, 1939. Mosley always said he would have fought to the death for King and Country had he been permitted.
Britain did not fight to bring down ‘fascism’ or defend Jewry or all the other slop that has been poured over the Second World War to serve polemical purposes. It fought to preserve the balance of power on the Continent, and (as the doctrine dictated) it joined the weaker major combatant, France. This was no different from August 1914 except that Belgium was replaced by Poland as the indefensible ‘rights of small nations’ casus belli.
A nationalist such as Mosley did not buy this rationale for risking the Empire, but he would not have been happy to see Germany or any other foreigner lording it over Britain. Only after the war did he come to believe that the Cold War had altered the equation and made a federal ‘Europa’ a necessary counterweight to US capitalism and Soviet communism.
That plunge into premature Europhilia was the logical outcome of the Third Way advocacy that Mosley had been hiking around political parties, including his own, since he became an MP just after the Great War. Like Ernst Junger, the ‘case’ of Mosley is wholly defined by his frontline experience: the combination of noblesse oblige, quasi-democratic comradeship, distaste for the longeurs of his own, officer class but acknowledgment of a need for firm command founded on personal charisma. Mosley’s half-contemptuous, half-affectionate relations with his hard core of East End supporters was always a little like that of a popular subaltern with the bad hats of his platoon: “‘E’s a toff, but ‘e’s a gent!”.
Also perhaps-- a facet of the Western Front little remarked by poets and autobiographers-- Mosley was sapped by the long stretches of boredom and lassitude between bursts of combat; it made him too much of a lotus eater and philanderer ever to get up a demagogic head of steam in the 1930s. True tyrants are ascetic.
Posted by Amalek on Tuesday, March 7, 2006 at 08:05 PM | #
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