your Lipstadt trial index your Deborah Lipstadt dossier No. 26, August 1, 2004 [ German translation ] continued, part 3 THE US President bleats about “illegal” pictures of coffins of the US dead coming home. Wisely, the British Army always buried its dead in the theatre of battle; that has now changed. Dead GIs too are now brought home — carried off the planes feet first, as the soldier “keeps
on marching.” President Bush now tells the American public that to “respect the privacy” of the grieving families, pictures of coffins should not be shown. That excuse carries as much weight as his original claims about the Weapons, the uranium from Niger, Saddam’s “nucular” ambitions, the mobile weapons laboratories, and all the other bellicose guff that he and the Pentagon have spewed forth to justify what is, in simple terms, a war crime.
Parading the coffin is traditionally the last mark of respect for a soldier; John F Kennedy’s was paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1963; two years later, Winston Churchill’s was paraded down the Thames in a navy launch, while millions lined the river banks.
My father’s, wrapped in the British flag, was borne in a hearse through the streets and lanes of North Wales, and I saw a lone British village policeman, a bobby, swing to attention and snap a smart salute as it passed by, an unforgettable moment in my life, forty years ago. In my book on the Nuremberg Trials I quote the last letter written by a general to his wife — he had been granted the uncomfortable privilege of knowing the precise hour when he was to die.
He bade her to listen to the clock on Nuremberg’s St Lawrence cathedral: “When the hour strikes,” he wrote, “all my friends will be gathered around you. On a gun carriage rests my coffin, and all the Germans soldiers are marching in procession — out in front the fallen, with the living bringing up the rear.” That was Alfred Jodl, about to be executed by a US army hangman for conspiracy to launching an unprovoked war against sovereign countries.
George Bush believes in bringing home the coffins of soldiers who have died for him by the hundred in the airborne equivalent of a Waste Management truck. That is the picture that he did not want his voters to see. One would like to think that sometimes he and Tony Blair lie awake at night, ashamed of what they have done.