The address below was given in 1992 at the 486^th BG Memorial Service at St. Gregory’s by the Reverend Michael Skliros MA, former RAF Chaplin.

Sudbury Parish Church - 19 May 1992

On top of all the many many words and tokens of welcome you 8th Air Force must have received in the past few days, I am glad - and very proud - to add my own sixpennyworth - 10 cents to you! For many of you, it may be your 1st visit since you left in uniform back in the 40's, and you have therefore got a lot of hard remembering to do, finding the runways and satellite airfields that used to be so crawling with noisy flying ironmongery, now overrun by peaceful wheat and barley; also tracking down those friendly spit and sawdust pubs, serving warm flat beer out of wooden barrels, as God intended, now gin palaces peddling cold fizzy lager, with juke boxes in the corner and other ghastly innovations from I just can't guess where. I'm sure you are equally horrified.

But we English have a lot of accurate remembering to do as well, because though we are celebrating the years '42-'92, many Americans, to their credit, had joined us long before Pearl Harbour - some fighting in the Battle of Britain, and at one time there were 3 Eagle Squadrons of American pilots wearing RAF uniforms with large eagle shoulder badges, flying spitfires with RAF roundels.

Then came your Army Air Corps with those strange uniforms. Pink pants, I believe we called you. Oh yes they were. Pink! Probably for that reason alone you changed your trousers, and your name, from USAAC to USAAF, and started instead stealing our women in a fairly big way. I was young at the time, but I think what really got to our young men was not so much that you pinched our girls, but that they all trotted happily off states-side with hardly a backward glance.

Anyway, all is forgiven now. And I do say that seriously. There was resentment, very naturally. Every generation reckons itself the finest its country, or any country, has ever known and resents any challenge to that. After all, we have only just finished sneering at everything Victorian, because secretly we suspect that they got it together rather better in the last century than we are doing in this so-called modern scientific age, so we have had to boost our self-esteem by running them down at every occasion. In the same way, you no doubt threatened our way of life and must have experienced a natural hostility at your presence here, coming in at the last minute to win the war, while we stood alone in 1940, Errol Flynn taking Burma single-handed and all that kind of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, which has now almost disappeared, and been replaced by a genuine respect for your American zest and general way of going about things, even though they will never be our way, even for your very colourful use of the English language, and of course not least for your achievements and gadgets and inventions - all except the juke box, really.

Without doubt, that growing respect for the United States has been helped by our realising just what you did in the 1940's, and I mean you. When the mighty 8th took to the air, it suffered (I believe I am right) proportionally the highest sustained casualty rate, day after day, of any arm of any allied military force. It speaks volumes for your courage, because you knew what was happening, though perhaps courage isn't the right word. At these times, emotions go into a kind of deep freeze, each into separate compartments.

My first instructor was a Lancaster pilot; naturally, as a true Brit, he played it all down. On the one occasion I did get him to talk about it he just said: "well you saw this fireworks display ahead and you said to the co- 'shall we go in?' 'Might as well, it's what we're paid for'; so we did". To be factual, if they didn't drop their tally of bombs, it didn't count as a mission and they knew they'd have to do it again on another night, but what he didn't tell was the fear that every airman knows, the fear which is second to none - worse even than seeing those 109's and 190's coming at you, head-on, in packs - the fear of being trapped in a burning aircraft. I can only say to these people for you, as you know well, that if it you were caught in a blazing aircraft and couldn't get to your parachute, and it was a choice between jumping to certain death or staying inside and perhaps making it down badly burned, you jumped. The evidence was there on the ground. It happened to our aircrew as well, but in far greater numbers to yours, day after day.

I am sorry - we didn't know what you went through and of course weren't told your casualty rates. But we do now. And we are grateful.

In spite of that, WWII didn't seem to affect you nationally as much as WWI, or the Great War as we call it, did to us. Before the Great War we were a confident competent country, at ease with ourselves (those Victorians again) and our lads went off to Flanders Field with eyes shining and arms swinging high - to the war to end all wars. As we know, that spirit took the most fearful hammering.

I was at a NATO unit at AFCENT in the Netherlands when your Vietnam war ended. A pfc came bounding down from the American section to tell me. Do you know, he said solemnly, we lost 65,000 men in that war. I congratulated him and was glad for him, genuinely, but didn't tell him that we lost very nearly that number - 56,000 - on the Somme in one day - 17,000 in the first 20 minutes - and it was as a result of the Great War, I believe, with its 20 million dead (no counsellors in those days), that people in this country stopped believing in God. Of course that's a value judgement, could never be proved, and people still do go to church, after a fashion, but those swinging arms and shining eyes have been replaced by what you Americans think of as British reserve, which is partly that of course, but is partly a deep pessimism, an unwillingness to be caught hoping too much, a mistrust of all generals, certainly a deep anti gung-ho reaction that dates, I believe, from that time between 9 O'clock and 9.30 on the morning of 17 July 1917.

Anyway, that is our problem. Your losses in WWII, though large, did not, I believe, bite so deeply into your national psyche. Was it possibly more like the Afghan war was to the Russians, now that we can say these things, ie a worthy cause in a far-off country, with not too many voices raised against it at home, yet nevertheless an awful lot of wives and mothers realising privately, one by one, that their menfolk would not be coming back. But am I right, and please tell us afterwards, it didn't affect the national mood, did it, like Vietnam, which was your watershed, with even more painful truths. At least our wives and mothers were glad to have their men back after the Great War, those that did return, but yours who returned from Vietnam walked into a distinctly mixed reception, which I understand many have never recovered from. These are all painful truths, but I believe this is the building, the only type of building where they can and must be voiced, so that all these ghosts can be laid to rest. It is simply no good pretending as a church to be anti-war and let the casualties, psychological or otherwise, go and stew.

As for our reflections on war itself, there is no more solution to that than to the problem of pain and suffering itself. They are always the war to end all wars, yet they never are. "Mankind is born to trouble", as the Old Testament says, "as surely as sparks fly upwards". (Job 5:7), and there is that enigma that they bring out the worst, and the best, in the human spirit. The worst, certainly, but also the best. To the question: ‘was it all worth it?’ - all those who are now maimed, mentally damaged, all the empty chairs - I do genuinely find it encouraging to reflect on Jesus' example, not to be dazzled by how marvelously he did everything - that would only make us more depressed - but rather the reverse: what a shambles his ministry all was, from the human point of view. Sent into the world to rescue mankind and bring the whole earth back to God, his work was really a ragbag of bits and pieces, each worthwhile in itself probably, but without any cohesion.

He moved from town to town, doing a bit here, a bit there. Staying for 1 night with St Peter at Capernaum, he healed some sick people but didn't stay on to make sure of their full recovery. No consolidation, as we would say. In fact when Peter tried to get him to stay on "because all are seeking thee", he simply said "let's go into the next town, that I may preach there also." He healed many, and they went back home changed people no doubt, but lost amid an unchanged population. He fed a crowd in the desert; we are told explicitly no one understood what on earth was happening. he made a rich young man think - we are not told with what result. He rescued a prostitute. He had half an hour's interesting conversation with a Roman civil servant. He comforted a dying thief. From a human point of view, he left the world pretty much as he found it.

So when we despair about the futility of war not achieveing anything, let us hold fast to the apparent aimlessness of Jesus' own life - random, inconclusive bits and pieces, which were nevertheless gathered up on the first Easter morning and raised with him into one seamless pattern of redemption, as will - I believe - your efforts, together with those you left behind.

However, on a happier note, 1945 did not see the end of the American forces in these islands, especially your Air Force. You have appeared in our squadrons in ones and twos on a very successful exchange basis, as well as continuing your own larger bases at Lakenheath, Mildenhall, Bentwaters, Woodbridge and elsewhere, and you have of course continued to steal our women. Not much has changed, really. Many mixed nuptials I have taken in the last few years. In one of them I actually had to raise my voice when prompting the bride to say her vows "I, Mary-Rose, take thee, Elmer" so she could hear me above the clicking of the camera shutters.

And your Air Force, I must say, is in pretty good spirits. I was in the control tower at Leuchars many years ago, as a chaplain by this time, when we were paid a visit by one of those brand new American F4 Phantoms that we'd all heard so much about. There was an American callsign, then "Whisky Tango, permission to make a lowish pass over your field". I should explain to you groundworms that a request to make a lowish pass is a euphemism for "I am going to beat up your airfield; you try and stop me". "Go ahead, Whisky Tango" and he came skimming in from the North Sea at about 50 feet until he was half way down the runway, when he stood on his tailpipe and went straight up, and up and up. The Station Warrant Officer coming round a comer saw a group of airmen goggling at the sky and did a rerun of the 1st chapter of Acts "Why stand ye looking up into heaven?" or words to that effect "Lo, sire, a USAF birdman visiteth" they replied or something like that - the exact conversation went straight into the 23 Sqn linebook. "Give us your position, Whisky Tango" said the air trafficker, flicking a switch so that the reply would go into every crewroom on base. "This is Whisky Tango, I am flying at 190 knots at flight level 290" (that's 29,000 feet - 0 to 29,000, vertically, from virtually a standing start) "..flight level 290, over - let me see now - Lewchars, Scotland". It had style! We were impressed, and to this day there is a small injoke among some of the RAF, when we bump into one another and say "do you remember the good times we had - not at Leuchars but at - let me see now - Lew-chars, Scotland".

Some of your R/T calls are a little on the casual side, though, I have to say. I was motoring round the sky one sunny afternoon near S Cerney in Gloucestershire, minding my own business, when the cockpit suddenly went black and a voice on the R/T said "B29 rolling now". Rolling now, fooey; it had long since taken off from Fairford and was 100 feet above me. When I got back, I logged 10 seconds night flying.

Ah well, I suppose it evens out; we used to do 'practise pans' dead overhead your bases in the hope of being invited to do a practice forced landing and perhaps getting a free steak and french fries, but they always diverted us somewhere English and boring -like Heathrow.

But if the sight of USAF uniforms in our crewrooms now no longer seems strange - indeed makes a lot of sense - it makes even more sense, yet it is still distinctly strange, to see German uniforms there as well, exchange Officers from the German Air Force - indeed, the Luftwaffe. In fact when the entire Richthofen Geschwabe [sic] landed at Wattisham, black crosses and all, I noticed many of the greying handlebar moustaches give quite a nervous twitch.

Yet of course it's a thoroughly good thing, if only to prove that our former adversaries are human and not quite as ruthlessly invincible as we thought. An RAF pilot was up with a German navigator recently, and at the end of the exercise uttered the time-honoured cry "where are we, nav?" After a pause "We're over the sea". "Which sea, nav?" Much longer pause this time "You mean, you want a pin-point?" No great threat there, I feel.

Anyway we're wasting valuable time, because after the next ceremony we can all adjourn and cheer each other up with lots more navigator stories.

For my part, I have just tried to convey, with a little background perhaps how very welcome you are here, and your forces continue to be, that your people and ours have put in a lot of mileage together now, and how enormously grateful we are for what you did, and went through, for us.

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