E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The famous Blitz on Britain from German aerial bombardment began 70 years today.  Few events in the West's 20th century have remained as vivid, as imprinted on a culture's imagination.  A fortnight before, Allied planes had bombed Berlin, triggering the counter-attack (both sides went on increasingly to explore the idea of a "total war" from the skies, culminating in the fire-bombing of Dresden; then Japan) - one of my great-uncles flew on the RAF bombing raids over Germany; many of my relations died in Coventry, which some claim Churchill let be destroyed to conceal broken codes for strategic purposes. Perhaps, in the popular imagination, the Blitz is most omnipresent in the following: the documentaries of Jennings , such as Fires Were Started ; references in novels (such as when the Narnia children are sent to the countryside); and in the poems of WWII.  Most famous of these Blitz poems must be Dylan Thomas 's 'A Refusal To Mourn the Death, by Fire, of ...