05.07.2012

Lifting the other memorial

The past week has seen the unveiling of a £1.5 million memorial in the UK to the 55,573 airmen of Bomber Command that lost their lives during the second world war. Located in Green Park, London it was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth.

At the same time some 75 miles/120km to the south bomber command veteran Joe Williams, 90, achieved a long held ambition to erect a memorial to those comrades who never came home, on the cliff top at Beachy Head, on England’s south coast.
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Joe Williams in the operator's seat of the Unic spider crane

Beachy Head was the last sight of Britain that the bomber crews would see as they headed out over the channel on their nightly air raids. Williams completed 20 missions as a Lancaster Bomber rear gunner before being shot down over Czechoslovakia in 1945 and has largely funded the six tonne granite memorial out of his savings.

Getting the memorial to the site and then lifting it in place was something of a challenge, but the Royal Air Force loaned a Chinook Helicopter to carry both the two piece memorial and then the crane that was used to assemble it - a four tonne Unic URW-547 spider crane.
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The Chinook airlifts the Unic spider crane to Beachy Head

The crane, supplied by Unic distributor and rental company GGR, had to first of all place the rectangular base in position on a specially prepared slab. The next step involved lifting the top half into position without trapping the slings. All of this was carried out on the edge of the well-known chalk cliff face- some 120 metres above the sea.
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The top half of the memorial is carefully lifted into place

Raising a memorial to Bomber Command has been a controversial issue over the past 70 years as many politicians struggled with the bombing of German cities during the last year or so of the conflict. Few survivors remain now. Right or wrong the 55,573 servicemen who lost their lives, were simply obeying orders and doing their duty and deserve to me remembered. This personal memorial to them - is a good deal more poignant than the big and glamorous one in central London?
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Joe Williams, the GGR team and the completed memorial