"That there’s some corner of a foreign field, That is for ever England!"
Those few words are from a very famous poem by Rupert Brooke. It deals with twin themes, of death and of love, and I learnt it when at Grammar school back in the middle 1950’s, before I went to work and to college! It was scorned by many of the so-called literary elite as being a typical product of a ‘Jingoistic’ mind, with it’s seemingly outdated and outmoded calls to patriotism, to a deep love of one’s native country, and to the ultimate sacrifice.
I was reminded of this poem by the visit to my home of the married son of a friend, together with his children. As a ‘desktop’ on my own PC, I have a painting of a Boeing B-17 bomber of World War Two vintage, and the young lad, who thought he knew most modern aircraft, asked me what this particular aircraft was called. When I told him it’s name, and that the history of our British Isles would have been so terribly different if over three thousand similar American aircraft had not been destroyed by enemy action, and the brave men who flew in them had died so that we might live in comfort and security today, he admitted that he had never even heard of this sacrifice. He said that obviously he had learned about such times as the Second World War, but apart from such things as the Battle of Britain, Alamein and the Normandy campaign, the very fact that we hosted veritable Armies of Americans had just been passed over as though it had never happened.
I told him about the American Hangar at the Imperial War Museum’s Duxford site, where these brave boys and men are remembered; those boys who took off and flew in broad daylight against the German enemy. They flew and fell in their hundreds and thousands, but they never faltered, they never drew back, because they knew that so many were depending upon their efforts. It is almost fashionable for some of the left-educated and liberal young to sneer and scoff when speaking about America, to extend their verbal disgust about a country which few have visited, and even fewer understand. They forget that American wealth and American blood have rescued this world twice in war, and their armed might stood foremost hard up against the fabled “Iron Curtain” of Churchill fame to defend a war-weary Europe against the rapacious Red Armed Forces of an ever-hungry Soviet Russia.
I wrote of this aircraft on my own blog a year ago, and I gave the web-locator address to this young computer-savvy kid, who had just learned of another page in the history of his country that was completely new to him. Before his father left, this youngster asked me if I had any memories of the War. I replied that, as I was only five when the War ended, I couldn’t remember much, but I did remember the noise!
What can you say about Jimmy Carter that hasn’t already been said? 
