The Danger Zone (DZ)

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;

Today we know that China is doing fabulously well and winning the cyber and technological wars. How do we know this? Because China is telling us it is. Hang on. China said there was no terrible new virus breaking out from its laboratory in Wuhan and went out of its way to hide the story. Problem with a pandemic is that sooner or later you have to fess up. Well they didn’t fess up but the rest of the world guessed – I mean its pretty hard to ignore a pandemic. Makes you think doesn’t it.

So the question is, is China doing well in the cyber technology war or not? Are they telling us the truth or not? And the answer is most likely, Not. Stick with me and in this programme I’ll give you an answer to that question with a surprise ending.

Tag words: Huawei; Sheridan Prasso; Blomberg; Great Firewall of China; Chinese Communist Party; CCP; Low Earth Orbit satellites; LEOs; Elon Musk; Space X;

Woody Allen started performing as a stand up comic in New York. Some really funny stuff. But who would ever have thought that he was a prophet! I mean he’s Jewish, which has a history going back thousands of years of having some extraordinary prophets. But this will really throw you.

I’m going to tell you that the Chinese Communist Party probably has you under surveillance inside your home right now, and if it doesn’t it soon will have.

Now I’ll explain what that has to do with you.

Tag words: Woody Allen; CCP; Chinese Communist Party; Jonathon E Hillman; The Digital Silk Road; Centre for Strategic and International Studies; Xi Jinping; Adolf Hitler; Cisco; Xiaomi; The Internet in Everything; Laura DeNardis; US Director of National Intelligence; James Clapper; Hangzhou Safari Park; Jennifer Pan; Dr. Li Wenliang; Bird Flu; Horace;

Liu Xiaobo is a dangerous man. The Nobel Peace Prize website tells us this about how serious a threat he poses to the freedom, peace loving Chinese Communist Party.

Liu was born on the 28th December 1955. He studied literature and philosophy. Then he worked as a literary critic and university lecturer in Beijing. He took a doctorate in 1988. After that he was a guest lecturer at universities throughout Europe and the USA.

It first became apparent that Liu was dangerous when he took part in the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. For that he was sentenced to two years in prison – clearly the Chinese Communist Party took a lenient view of his serious errors, expecting to be repaid with gratitude, not betrayal. But this mad man later served three years in a labour camp for having once more spoken out criticising China's one-party system. Why would anyone do such a thing!

For over twenty years, Liu has fought for a more open and democratic China. He demands that the Chinese authorities comply with Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution, which lays down that the country's citizens enjoy "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration". Is he serious? Just because the Constitution says this, does Liu seriously expect it? I warned you that he was mad.

In 2008, Liu was a co-author of what is called Charta 08. It’s a manifesto which advocates the gradual shifting of China's political and legal system towards a democratic system. He was arrested in December 2008, and sentenced a year later to eleven years' imprisonment for undermining the state authorities. Once more the tolerant and paternal regime gave him a slap on the wrist, not wanting to go too hard on him – which is clearly what he deserved. Liu has constantly denied the charges. He says "Opposition is not the same as undermining". He clearly misses the point.

On 8 October 2010 the Nobel Prize committee, in the days when it acted with integrity and upheld its principles, rather than bowing down to the Chinese Communist Party, announced that it was awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to him.

Peking University acted appropriately, by using marvellous new technology, to examine the facial expressions of the students on hearing this news. Any face that “showed unusual happiness” could be guilty of serious face crime and at risk of having their scholarship cancelled – possibly worse.

Modern technology, social media companies and silicon valley high tech companies know how to treat the Chinese Communist Party with respect. Let me tell you more.

Tag words: Liu Xiaobo; Nobel Peace Prize; Chinese Communist Party; CCP; Tiananmen Square Massacre; Tiananmen Square; Syed Rizwan Farook; Tashfeen Malik; Apple iPhone 5C; National Security Agency; Apple; FBI; ISIS; Tim Cook; John Brennan; Guizhouu-Cloud Big Data; Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management; Xi Jinping; Facebook; Twitter; YouTube; Great Firewall of China; Mark Zuckerberg; Liu Yunshan; Google; Hikvision; Department of Homeland Security; Honeywell; Swann; Peterson Air Force base; The China Electronics Technology Group Corporation; RAAF Edinburgh Air Force Base; Australian Defence Forces; Australian Broadcasting Commission; ABC; Dahua; AUSTRAC; Office of National Assessments; Department of Prime Minister; Central Security Distribution; Australian Federal Police; AFP; IPVM;

The Chinese Communist Party has emerged as the major threat that Australia is facing today to our national security and even our national sovereignty.

Tag words: Chinese Communist Party; CCP; People’s Liberation Army; PLA; Clive Hamilton; Secret Invasion. China’s Influence in Australia; Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials; Aviation Industry Corporation of China; AVIC; People’s Liberation Army Air Force; Liaoning; Australian Research Council; Professor Qiao Shizhang; University of Adelaide; Beijing University of Chemical Technology’s College of Chemical Engineering; State Key Laboratory; James McGregor; Ghost Fleet; Peter Singer; August Cole; Liberal Senator James Paterson; Deakin University; Centre for Cyber Security Research and Innovation; Professor Yang Xiang; Xidian University; Australian Defence Force Academy; Professor Hu Jiankun; Ministry of Public Security; Harbin Institute of Technology; Beihang University; FBI; CSIRO; Defence Science and Technology Group; DST; Spy Schools; Daniel Golden;

Here’s a bit of fun. Complete this sentence: “There is a common sentiment in China that government officials will only speak the truth when …” – over to you. Finish that sentence.

I’m sorry times up. If you said “when they are drunk or careless” you were right.

That question was read out of a standard book, “Human Resources Management” by Raymond J Stone, then used at Monash University in Melbourne, by lecturer Aaron Wijeratne in May 2017. This sentence reflects a sentiment often expressed in China. In the Western world, this idea is found, perhaps, in a Latin saying – in vino veritas. Translated “in wine there is truth”.

But a student from China, in the class, Gao Song, wasn’t amused, worse still, he was offended, and he did something about it.

Tag words: Human Resources Management; Raymond J Stone; Gao Song; Chinese Communist Party; CCP; WeChat; Monash University; Robert Brooks; Global Times; Sydney Today; Clive Hamilton; Silent Invasion – China’s Influence in Australia; Christopher Hughes; London School of Economics; Dalai Lama; University of Sydney; Michael Spence; Victoria University; Professor Colin Clark; Confucius Institute; Tiananmen Square; Xi Jinping; Perry Link;

I love this story.

In 2014, Prime Minister Tony Abbott made his first visit to China. One of the people who went with him was his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. They were attending the Boao Forum. A Chinese Communist Party initiative for meetings of high level leaders from government, business and academics to share their visions on the most pressing issues in this part of the world.

It also enjoys the international reputation as being THE most bugged event in China. That is a remarkably high honour.

Before the delegates left Australia for the conference they were all briefed by ASIO on how to handle themselves and what dangers to look out for. Some, like beautiful women spies, called “honey pots” in the spy trade, prove impossible for some delegates to resist. You might find one in your room when you first arrive. A sad comment on our abandonment of morality as a follow on with the left doing their darndest to remove Christianity from our society.

Some of the ASIO tips, maybe you’ll find these useful if you’re ever going to visit China, include the advice to take a different phone with you, not your usual one. Use a different SIM card as well – very important that. Never, ever, plug your phone into a charger that is generously provided at no charge by the Chinese Communist Party controlled hotel that you’re staying in.

Typically at conventions you’ll end up sooner or later with at least one complimentary USB stick. Throw it away. Don’t use them.

Finally, never ever leave your laptop, or other electronic devices, in your hotel room if you’re not there in the room.

When Peta Credlin was shown to her room she followed some of the essential security advice that she’d been given. She unplugged her bedside clock radio and disconnected the TV set from its power source.

A few minutes later there was a knock at her door. KNOCKING SOUND “Housekeeping”. She had just checked into the room. If it was about housekeeping you’d think the room would have been properly prepared for her arrival and they wouldn’t need to come calling as soon as you’ve entered your room. She opened the door and the person entered the room. This person was none too subtle. They plugged in the TV set and the bedside clock radio and left. They did nothing more.

Peta Credlin immediately unplugged them both again.

Again, a few minutes later there was a knock at her door. KNOCKING SOUND. The person entered, plugged the TV set and the bedside clock radio and left again.

This time Peta Credlin unplugged her bedside clock radio and put it outside her room next to the door. She then covered her TV set with a towel.

By the way, if you find a cute Chinese girl in your room, do the same with her that Peta Credlin did with her bedside clock radio – put her out in the hall.

Now I’m going to talk about boxes that the Chinese Communist Party uses.

Tag words: Tony Abbott; Boao Forum; ASIO; Chinese Communist Party; Peta Credlin; CCP; Bob Carr; Tiananmen Square Massacre; Dr Jim Cairns; Federal Labor Party; Silent Invasion; Clive Hamilton; Bob Hawke; Paul Keating; Kevin Rudd; Sam Dastyari; ALP; Huang Xiangmo; Zhu Minshen;