The Book of the Poppy Read Online Free Page B

included swarms of German fighters and night-fighters, dense anti-aircraft fire, enemy radar (which alerted enemy gun and fighter crews long before the bombers arrived on target), adverse weather and mechanical failure. Some 125,000 men served in Bomber Command, and 55,573 were killed, a mortality rate of 44 per cent. Bomber crewman life expectancy dropped to around six weeks in 1943–44, much less than that of an infantry officer in the trenches of the First World War.
    Returning to the military campaign, Britain’s armed services casualties during the conflict were significantly fewer than the First World War, although the figure of 383,000 is still chilling. During the six years of war, the armed services grew in size (via conscription), professionalism, technological might and influence. They fought in every conceivable theatre, environment and condition – the jungles of Burma, the deserts of North Africa, the icy landscapes of Norway, the mountains of Italy, the hedgerows of Normandy, the bitter Arctic and Atlantic waters and the skies above Western Europe. Armour, artillery and air power became the war-winning instruments, while on the oceans the supremacy of the battleship was replaced by the aircraft carrier, a weapon system chiefly developed by the United States and Japan. There were also new types of soldier – each side developed units (such as the British Special Air Service) of what we would now refer to as ‘special forces’, men tasked with the most dangerous and secretive of assignments, generally well behind enemy lines.
    Given the way the Second World War engulfed the planet in destruction, it seems almost churlish to speak of winners and losers. Yet the fact remains that not only did Britain, through the efforts of its armed forces, avoid the fate of occupation that visited much of the rest of Europe, it also played a critical role in liberating territories from Nazi and imperial Japanese control. At the same time, we must recognise that these ultimate goals would have been impossible without the vast military and industrial resources of the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1945 Britain was somewhat in the shadow of these emergent superpowers, but we nevertheless owe a debt of gratitude to the generation of those years, who in many ways literally made possible the freedoms we take for granted today.
    MODERN WORLD, MODERN WARS
    The post-Second World War era has been a turbulent time for the Britain’s armed forces. From 1945 to the present day there have been two competing demands. The first is economic pressure. The armed forces have been through numerous periods of cutbacks in both manpower and spending on resources and technology. Yet running against the grain of the cutbacks has been the fact that Britain’s armed forces have rarely seen a year when they were not in action. Some of these conflicts have been major, such as the Korean War (1950–53), the Falklands War (1982), the First Gulf War (1990–91), the Iraq War (2003-2011) and the war in Afghanistan (2001–present), the latter being the longest-running continuous conflict in British history. At the same time, British soldiers have served in numerous insurgency and peacekeeping conflicts, low-level but destructive wars that can see a soldier’s role fluctuate between ‘hearts-and-minds’ humanitarian work and outright combat with dizzying regularity. Such actions include the Malayan Emergency (1948-60), the campaign in Aden (1964-68), long and testing service in Northern Ireland (1969–98) and operations in the war-torn Balkans in the 1990s.
    The nature of warfare since 1945 could not have seen more dramatic transformations. Almost every aspect of combat technology has been revolutionised by computerisation, so that today we are no longer amazed by pilotless unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), precision-guided munitions (PGMs) that can hit pin-point targets after miles of flight, and military surveillance satellites that can map