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Choices

When I was a teacher, I remember being told that if you could praise a child three times for each time you made a criticism of work or behaviour, you were doing well and were likely to build a positive learning environment. I tried, but did not always succeed.

I was intrigued to discover the other day that the same three to one ratio was suggested by Winston Churchill for the number of German villages to be flattened by the RAF in revenge for the destruction of Lidice by the Nazis and any other similar atrocities. Clement Attlee disagreed, stating that Britain should not join a race to the worst beastliness. Whether it was that which persuaded Churchill not to go ahead, I don't know. More practical factors weighed against such a response; Bomber Command was already stretched and suffering huge casualties and to risk even greater loses of men and machines simply to destroy villages would have distracted from priority operations.

Of course, the bombing campaign undertaken by the RAF and USAF was controversial at the time and has remained so. Whilst there is no doubt of the bravery of the men of Bomber Command - my Dad was one of them - the extent to which they succeeded in achieving their aims is a matter of debate.

On my way to Lidice I shall cycle through Dresden - the one in Germany, unless I get unusually lost within ten miles of leaving Burslem. The raid that destroyed much of the city and incinerated an unknown number of people (claims range from 25,000 to 75,000, with most settling for somewhere around 45.000) saved the last Jews from transportation (provided that they survived the firestorm), did immense damage and probably caused difficulties for the German army as it retreated in the face of the Red Army, but only closed the railway for a few days and did not destroy civilian morale.

Dresden was far form the only city so treated. Lidice, though amongst the best known, was not the only village destroyed out of vengeance or plain spite. Glancing through a few pages of the records of the Nuremberg Trials, one reads a pitiable list of villages where civilians of all ages were shoved into barns, doused with petrol and burned alive, or choked by the smoke, or shot ....

Historian Norman Davies - an excellent, thoughtful, provoking, but balanced writer - briefly moans that Lidice is the only atrocity in eastern Europe most people seem to know about. (He probably means students of history.) How many of us have even heard of Lezaky, a smaller village destroyed in revenge for the assassination of Heydrich? How many know the name of a single Belarusian village destroyed by the SS?

Which is exactly why we need to know about our past and dig strong foundation for a better understanding of other places and people for our future. And exactly why the more people who know about Stoke-on-Trent and Lidice the better.

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