In September 1939, Czechoslovakia was betrayed to Adolf Hitler by the British and the French. It had been done for the most noble of motives, in an effort to avoid another war with Germany. They had thrown Czechoslovakia to the ravenous beast that Adolf Hitler was. It turned out to be rather unsuccessful in avoiding disaster as 60 million people died in World War II rather than a few thousand that might have died if they had instead called Hitler’s bluff. Although it was then more likely that his generals would have removed him in a coup.

It would be 50 years, though, before the Czechs would be able to breath the air of freedom again.

This is the third part in the series on poor Prague. This is the part where the Czechs at last were able to throw off the cruel slavery of Communism and win their independence in what is known as the Velvet Revolution. This is the story of the Velvet Revolution.

Tag words: Czechoslovakia; Adolf Hitler; Prague; Communism; Velvet Revolution; Richard Fidler; The Golden Maze. A Biography of Prague; The Seven Wonders of Czechoslovakia; Prague Spring; Tiananmen Square; Chinese Communist Party; CCP; Lech Walesa; Solidarity Movement; Iron Curtain; East Berlin; Gunter Schabowski; Berlin Wall; Nazi; Gestapo; Red Berets; Martin Schmid; Vaclav Havel; Wenceslas Square; Melantrich building; Marta Kubišová; Long live Marta; Miroslav Stepan; Letna Plain; St Vitus’ Cathedral; Hradcany; St Agnes; Overthrow of Communism; Communist Party; Ladislav Adamsec; Karel Kryl; Karel Gott; Karel Kryl; Alexander Dubcek;

On 8 May 1945, the German commander of Prague, General Rudolf Toussaint, signed an instrument of surrender with the Czech resistance. The deal was that the resistance would let the German armed forces leave the city without being shot at. Toussaint lamented: “Who am I now? A general without an army. All I can do is go home and sit in the ditch and look at the blue sky”.

The next morning a convoy of German armoured vehicles and trucks left the city. One brutal totalitarian regime had left.

That same afternoon a column of the Red Army arrived in the city. The Czechs had just switched one cruel oppressor for another – the Communists. It would be another 44 years before they would win their freedom from that one, with one brief period when a false illusion of hope would lift their spirits, only to be cruelly dashed. This programme looks at that oh so brief period of hope.

Tag words: Prague; General Rudolf Toussaint; Red Army; Prague Technical University; Strahov Dormitory; Leonid Brezhnev; Communist Party; Antonin Novotny; Alexander Dubcek; Hungarian Uprising; Action Programme; Prague Spring; Eastern Bloc; Vasil Bilk; Petro Shelest; Europarty; Shirley Bassey; Goldfinger; Big Spender; Narodni Street; Moody Blues; Mala Strana; Charles Bridge; The Nights in White Satin; Jaroslav Kovaricek; Oldrich Cernik; Warsaw Pact; Czechoslovakia; Hlavka Bridge; Vinoharadska Street; Wenceslas Square; A Prayer for Marta; Marta Kubišová; John Amos Comentus; Velvet Revolution; ABC Radio National; Russian State Symphony Orchestra; Albert Hall; Serendade in E; Dvorák;

Queen Libussa was a legendary witch in central Europe. But you won’t have heard of her. She lived a thousand years ago. One day, in a trance like state, while she was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the River Vltava and the forest on its far side, she spoke a prophecy saying: “I see a great city. Its glory will touch the stars”.

Then she said to one of her courtiers, “In the forest below there is a clearing. There you will find a man making the best use of his teeth at midday. That is the place where this city will be founded.”

The courtier did as the Queen had bade him, descended from the cliff and rode into the forest. There he saw some men. They were building a house but it was midday, so they had taken a break to eat their lunch, (making the best use of t heir teeth as she said) well all except for one man. He was still working, sawing a block of wood. The courtier went up to him and asked: “What are you making?”. He replied: “A threshold for a house”. In the Czech language the word for a threshold is a prah.

Libussa’s prophecy was right. The city that grew up on that sight is today called Prague, in the English, which means threshold - praha.

In these programmes I’m going to tell the story of three very dramatic moments in the life of that great and beautiful city. The misfortune of Czechoslovakia in 1938, was the gift to the world today of one of the great cities of Europe, left intact from the devastation of World War 2. So I should begin my story in 1938 and leave the mystical Queen Libussa on her cliff.

Tag words: Queen Libussa; River Vltava; Prague; Praha; Czechoslovakia; Bohemia; King Wenceslas; Adolf Hitler; President Hindenberg; Edvard Benes; President Woodrow Wilson; Vladimir Putin; Great Depression; Sudetenland; Tatra mountains; Nazis; Konrad Henlein; Lord Halifax; Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain; President Biden; Blum; Edouard Daladier; Josep[h Goebbels; Lord Runciman; Berchtesgaden; Benito Mussolini; Prime Minister Syrovy; Winston Churchill; Ukraine;

In last week’s programme I did the first part of a programme remembering the 60thanniversary of the beginning of Australia’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. A war to stop the brutal Stalinist regime of Ho Chi Minh from taking over the democratic country of South Vietnam.

I was joined for that programme by Gary McKay (now with Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours), a nasho, who served in Vietnam as a 2ndLieutenant in charge of a rifle platoon. He extended his time in national service so that he could serve with the Australian forces as they withdrew from that country. There is no more dangerous time for soldiers than when they are withdrawing, especially like here when the enemy knows that you are pulling out. Gary became engaged in a fierce battle, the last Australian battle of the Vietnam War, with regular North Vietnamese units on 21 September 1971. By then the 3 battalion task force had been whittled down to 2 battalions, and the Australian tank support had been withdrawn.

4 of the 5 Australian killed were in Gary’s platoon. The Australians expended over 140,000 rounds throughout that contact. Gary was awarded the Military Cross.

Today he conducts battlefield tours of Vietnam (with Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours), as well as writing many insightful books into that war and other instances of actions by first responders. He is also involved in the never ending battle to get justice for the veterans that fought in that war.

OK let’s push on with the interviewDZ 60th Anniversary of Australia’s Involvement in the Vietnam War 31 July 1962

By the end of World War II, the 125,000 men of Bomber Command weren’t just forgotten but were shunned. There was a deep sense of shame at the devastation that had been inflicted on Germany and its cities by what is called the indiscriminate area bombing campaign. I can understand the mood as being something like I experienced when the war in Vietnam came to an end.

The brave men and women who served Australia and the United States in the Vietnam War became the objects of disgust and even hatred That was to be the fate of the men and women who had served in Bomber Command during World War 2.

It took people of great courage and conviction to bravely battle to turn this thing around and to have the vital achievements of the men of Bomber Command, which made winning World War 2 possible, recognised.

One of the people who was most dedicated to the cause of erecting a lasting monument to the brilliant achievements of Bomber Command, correcting the mistreatment that those men received at the end of World War 2, was the late Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees. He was the president of the memorial’s heritage foundation for many years and a driving force in making the memorial’s realisation happen.

Shortly before his death, Robin Gibb got to visit the nearly complete Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park at the end of Piccadilly near Hyde Park Corner. He scrambled up ladders so he could take the full tour of the 15 metre high Memorial. When he came face to face with the 3 metre high crest emblazoned with the words “Bomber Command Royal Air Force”, the full impact of what he had accomplished hit him. He said:

“This is honestly the proudest thing I’ve ever done. It was so important to finally see the brave airmen who risked their lives every night to fly bombing raids over Germany and shorten the war were finally honoured, and now it is happening. This memorial is bigger than even the Wellington Memorial and will still be here long after we are gone. It will last forever.”

Robin Gibb died from the cancer that had hounded him for many years on 20 May 2012. Just over a month later, on 12 June 2012, the Bomber Command Memorial was formally dedicated by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II commemorating the contribution of the 125,000 aircrew of Bomber Command, including 10,000 Australians and our own Vic Trimble from Mareeba. 57,862 of them died performing this invaluable service, of self sacrifice, as Jesus said no greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for his friends. Just over 46% of all the aircrew died in performing this sacrifice for everyone in the world. Just think of it.

But because of the Christian nation that we live in, forgiveness is at the heart of our values and as the war neared its ends, the people in England and Australia began to see the horrific and extensive damage that Bomber Command inflicted as something to be ashamed of because they were moving to forgiving the Germans for the war.

We need to have a hard look right now at how Bomber Command contributed to winning the war to weigh up for ourselves whether their contribution to the war is a thing to be ashamed of, or to be grateful for.

Tag words: Bomber Command; Robin Gibb; Bomber Command Memorial; Vic Trimble; Albert Speer; D-Day; Richard J Evans; The Third Reich at War; Nazi; Heinrich Himmler; Ludoff von Alvensleben; Herman Göring; Count Ciano; Battle of the Bulge; Abraham; Genesis 22:18; Jesus Christ; God; Quentin Tarantino; Pulp Fiction; Norden bombsight; Judy Nickles;

On 9 November 1934, five years before World War 2 began, a schoolboy in the German city of Dresden, wrote an essay on aerial warfare. He imagined what would happen if some enemy decided to bomb his city. He wrote:

“The sirens howled and the people fled into their air-raid shelters. The bombs fell with deafening noise, blowing in windows and destroying all the houses.. Vast flames rage over Dresden. A second wave of enemy bombers come, dropping gas bombs. Almost everyone in the bomb shelters were killed. Ashes and rubble were all that remained. The raid was a total catastrophe.”

His teacher was furious. He wrote on the boys paper:

“It can’t get any worse! Stupid! Evil! It’s not so simple to lay waste to Dresden. You write almost nothing about defences. The essay is crawling with errors.”

Fifteen years later, by which time our student had undoubtedly volunteered or been conscripted to fight in the German Wehrmacht (their word for the armed forces), and had possibly been killed, the British did their last major night bombing raid of World War 2. On 13 February 1945 Dresden was bombed.

With the Russian army approaching, the city’s anti-aircraft defences had been moved to the front to fight the Russians. Dresden itself had not been bombed during the war and it looked highly unlikely that it would be.

Just like our student had written, the city had no defences. The next day the Americans carried out two raids over the city. A firestorm was created. Freakish, cyclone like winds, that engulfed the whole city in flames. 25,000 people were killed.

One of the people there during these air raids was an American prisoner-of-war – Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote about his experiences of this bombing in the novel, “Slaughterhouse Five”.

Of all of the actions of the war, this raid drew the most criticism for the allied programme of indiscriminate bombing of cities.

The men of Bomber Command became the forgotten soldiers of World War II. But things weren’t that simple. In this programme I’m going to give you a feel for what it was like being in a city while it was under attack from British bombers, and then in my last programme in this series, I’m going to tell you some remarkable things about the bombing policy on Germany and its effect on the German people.

Tag words: Dresden; Bomber Command; Kurt Vonnegut; Slaughterhouse Five; Lancaster bomber; Cookie; Len Deighton; Bomber; Nazi Party; Joseph Goebbels; Bomber Command Memorial;

Your everyday working life is, or was if you’ve retired, getting up out of bed, getting dressed for work and then heading off. At the end of the day you’d come home. It would be a shocking experience if you, or any of your work mates suffered some sort of reasonably serious work place accident. That would really throw you.

But if you were a crew member of a Lancaster bomber flying regular bombing missions over Germany, you would have been surprised if you went on even a couple of missions without seven men that you knew, crew of one of the bombers in your unit, didn’t return from a mission, probably dead. Captured if they were lucky.

Even today having a job in the Australian Defence Forces, the Police, the Fire Brigade, their work contract has a clause you won’t find in your employment contract. They are required to lay down their lives, if needed, in carrying out their duty.

I remember an eye witness during the September 11 attack on the twin towers saying something that he saw that staggered him. The man said that he watched people running from the buildings. That’s what you’d expect. He also watched the fire brigade and the police arriving at the buildings and running into the buildings, and almost certainly to their deaths. The Christian ethic of loving your neighbour, that these firefighters were putting into effect, couldn’t be further from what a lot of people promote today as the ideal – the ‘me’ culture. No way would a ‘me’ person be laying down their lives for others – for complete strangers.

And these men grew up in a society where death at childbirth, from disease, accidents etc were taken as part of life. Prince Philip made a speech on the 50thAnniversary of VJ Day in 1995 – the victory over Japan in the Pacific. Today we more modestly call it VP Day, Victory in the Pacific, so as not to offend the Japanese. Personally I think the Japanese are made of stouter stuff than that. Prince Philip, in his speech, told one of his truths about what it’s like to be a fighting man in war – a truth that still holds true today.

“It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn’t have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking ‘Are you all right – are you sure you don’t have a ghastly problem?’ You just got on with it.”

In this programme I’m going to tell you about what it was like getting ready to fly a bombing mission over Nazi occupied Europe.

Tag words: Lancaster bomber; VJ Day; Thermite bombs; Rolls Royce Merlin engines; Don McNaughton; Vic Trimble;

In Don McNaughton’s book about his father’s wartime experiences when he was the mid-upper gunner on a Lancaster bomber during World War 2, retold in “Lucky Pommie Bastard”, he talks about the night, some time after his father had passed away, that he and his mother watched a programme on TV about the British bombing campaign against Germany in World War 2.

His mother told him she found it helpful to understand more about her late husband, but she said she was still confused about something, something that had obviously troubled her husband from his war years, and that never left his subconscious.

So after the programme had finished she said to Don:

“I have some understanding of why your father could be short tempered but what was behind the many nightmares he suffered for years when he woke up in a sweat shouting ‘corkscrew, corkscrew’.”

Don wrote: “Mum had never asked Dad (or he didn't tell her) what his nightmares were about and it was the TV programme that at last informed her that the term was used when sighting a night fighter to get the pilot to take evasive action. This episode also gave me some further insight into how my mother dealt with her war experiences and with Dad, or rather how she could box those memories and experiences up, store them away and ignore them for so many years. Geez Mum if you had asked any of your sons (even me at 12 years old) they could have told you what "corkscrew" was all about and maybe made life a tad easier!”

Let me tell you about what his father meant by corkscrew and why that was a word that he would start screaming out during the night until his dying day.

Tag words: Don McNaughton; Lucky Pommie Bastard; Vic Trimble; Lancaster bomber; Corkscrew; Len Deighton; Bomber; Roy McNaughton; Major Heinz Wolfgang Schnauffer; Halifax bomber; Schräge Musik;

In 1939 the cost of travelling by cruise ship from Australia to England was beyond the wildest dreams of your average Australian. Overseas travel was an absolute luxury and only for the very richest people.

Most Australlian workers at this time got one week’s paid annual leave. Not much good if you wanted to spend two months sailing to England and then spend another two months sailing back.

There was some long distance air travel – in the great and luxurious flying boats of the time. They would fly over the Atlantic, and even to Australia, landing frequently on the water on their way. That was the beauty of the flying boats, airfields weren’t needed. But flying in these days, especially long distances, was extremely dangerous. Many important military leaders during World War 2 were killed in plane crashes, as was Major Glenn Miller. Churchill especially made many trips out of England during the war, nineteen in all between August 1941 and March 1945, and none of them were free of the risk of death.

And once again, just like travelling on a cruise ship, passenger flights were unbelievably expensive, considerably more than travelling on a cruise ship, and it required more courage than paying to fly into space for a few minutes on Elon Musk’s Project X space ships – which are infinitely safer.

So international travel for the overwhelming majority of Australians wasn’t even a dream.

The Great Depression in Australia was almost as bad as it was in Germany. It’s effects were still being felt when World War 2 started.

So what I’ve been saying in my long winded way, is that although heading off to war in England may not quite be your idea of a dream come true, it must have been a pretty exhilarating prospect for the young Australians who signed up to be trained as aircrews serving in Bomber Command, flying bombing missions over occupied Europe from air bases in England.

This type of war, a campaign waged entirely in the air, had never happened before so no one knew what to expect. It turned out to be something far worse than anyone had counted on – far worse for the crews flying those planes, and far worse for the people on the ground where the bombs were dropped.

But I’m sure the feelings of the loved ones back home, apart from never ceasing to worry about their loved ones serving with Bomber Command, had another dimenstion too which were probably reflected in the 1923 Eddie Cantor song , about the soldiers who had gone off to fight the Great War, “How Ya Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm”.

In this series of programmes I’m going to be looking at this air war through the eyes of a young man from Mareeba, Vic Trimble. His story, and the story of the crew of the Lancaster bomber that he skippered, is told in their biography written by Don McNaughton, the son of Roy McNaughton, who had just turned 19 when he joined Vic Trimble’s crew as a mid-upper air-gunner.

Vic and his crew were seven (that was how many men made up the crew of a Lancaster bomber) of about 10,000 Australians who volunteered for, and served with Bomber Command in the war against Nazi Germany in Europe. In all 125,000 personnel flew bombers against Germany and Italy during World War II. A staggering 55,573 of them gave their lives – but not in vain.

Jesus said in John 15:13: “For the greatest love of all is a love that sacrifices all. And this great love is demonstrated when a person sacrifices his life for his friends.”

Hitler and the Nazis were one of the greatest horrors that the world has ever seen and it was vital that his regime was brought down.

Tag words: Major Glenn Miller; Winston Churchill; Elon Musk; Project X; Great Depression; World War 2; Bomber Command; Eddie Cantor; How Ya Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm; Mareeba; Vic Trimble; Roy McNaughton; Nazi Germany; John 15:13; United States Army Air Force; President Roosevelt; Casablanca; French North Africa; El Alamein; Gone with the Wind; Scarlett O’Hara; Ashley Wilkes; 207 Squadron RAF; 51st Militia Battalion;