Green Park memorial to Bomber Command heroes

Plans for a £3 million memorial to the thousands of airmen of Bomber Command who died during the Second World War have been submitted.

The monument, featuring quotations from Winston Churchill and a bronze statue of an air crew within a line of stone columns, will be placed in Green Park.

It will honour the 55,573 airmen — with an average age of 22 — who died while carrying out night raids over Germany and occupied Europe.

The memorial project is being led by Douglas Radcliffe MBE, secretary of the Bomber Command Association.

Mr Radcliffe, 86, joined Bomber Command aged 17, training as a wireless operator/air gunner. The pilot and rear gunner he flew with when he first joined were killed during the campaign.

He said: "I think those men should be honoured. These were very young men we are talking about. Most of us could not even drive a car but there was no shortage of men willing to go and
fight and die."

The memorial has been designed by architect Liam O'Connor, who created the Armed Forces Memorial in the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield, Staffordshire, and also the Commonwealth Memorial Gates on Constitution Hill.

A planning application has been lodged with Westminster council and negotiations with the Royal Parks Agency, which manages Green Park, are ongoing. The association has raised £1.5 million.

Bomber Command was formed by the RAF in 1936 to fly raids at night. The 1940 quotation from Churchill on the monument reads: "The fighters are our salvation but the bombers are our means of victory."