The Valour and the Horror

Of the 125,000 air crew who served in Bomber Command almost half, 55,500, were killed. One in every five was a Canadian, and by population Canada suffered the greatest loss: 9,919 pilots, navigators, flight engineers, bomb aimers and gunners. At the end of the war, fighter pilots were given a special campaign medal for their contribution to the war effort. Bomber pilots were refused similar recognition even though many more of them died in combat. They were treated as an embarrassment - they had been ordered into the skies over Germany to bomb cities, and then they were blamed for the civilian deaths that resulted.