Remembering the Past in London

Went to several museums today including the incredibly well done Imperial War Museum. Though balanced and still relatively UK-centric, I couldn’t help but imagine what it must’ve been like to live in England and experience the peril of a totalitarian regime like the Nazi’s but a stone’s throw off our shores bombarding our biggest city every night.

As I meandered through the rooms in the museum, other thoughts kept streaming in to my consciousness:

• How close the Nazi’s came to deploying jet aircraft (a V-1 “buzz bomb” is pictured above) which — coupled with fuel had they been able to get it or ramp up synthetic fuels — would’ve changed the nature of the war

• Little Boy (the A-bomb) pictured above dropped on Hiroshima. Hitler also was supposedly somewhat close to A-bomb development as well. Talk about changing the nature of the war! At one point walking around London and seeing the lack of trash cans and the graffiti, I was suddenly struck by the thought, “Oh geez…what if Nazi Germany had won and London was controlled by them? What would this look like? Would people be beaten or killed for strewing trash around the streets?”

• The sacrifices by soldiers, people at home, innocent civilians, the Jews, downtrodden…hell, everybody was in some fashion impacted. The museum had a recreation of sitting in bomb shelter during the Nazi bombardment of London in 1940. Great subwoofers made you feel the boom of the bombs dropping overhead and then we walked through a faux bombed out street. It was a bit cheesey, but my wife and I discovered later that we both had thoughts while sitting in the shelter what it must’ve been like to have zero safety every night!

• How Winston Churchill’s leadership (which we experienced yesterday at the Cabinet War Room & Churchill Museum) inspired a nation to hold off Nazi Germany until others (i.e., US and Soviet Union) were compelled to enter (and the inevitable thought led to my own American leadership — or lack thereof — that is doing little-or-nothing to inspire the world during this so-called time of war).

My final thoughts were gratitude: to Churchill; to Britain; to America and the Allies; and everyone who fought, died, struggled and provided a world for me to grow up in and my children to inherit.