Ten German bombers: Thought police have no place at Wembley or anywhere else

“England fans heard singing banned ‘10 German bombers’ song at Euro 2020 clash with Croatia,” read the headline in The Telegraph sports section on 24 June. Under the tag “Exclusive”, the formerly conservative newspaper went on to wallow in woke indignation: “Telegraph Sport can reveal anti-discrimination monitors reported hearing the chant – which mocks German casualties during the Second World War – at England’s opening match against Croatia.”

“Anti-discrimination monitors” policing behaviour at a football match? Welcome to North-West Korea. The accusation that the infantile, but harmless, song “Ten German Bombers” is one which “mocks German casualties during the Second World War” could only come from someone totally insensitive to the sufferings of Britain under Nazi aerial bombardment in 1940 and the courage of the extremely young pilots who saved many lives, at the expense of their own, by shooting down the enemy bombers raining death and destruction on the helpless civilians below.

Apparently, by today’s woke “my country always wrong” standards, we should deplore the casualties inflicted by the RAF on the German invaders. With the wisdom of hindsight, shooting down Luftwaffe bombers going about their lawful occasions, razing London’s docklands and the homes of the poor in the East End, was unacceptably discriminatory. There may be a case for declaring RAF violence against German aircraft a hate crime – or possibly, in a more nuanced approach, a “non-crime hate incident”.

The singing of the “ten Bombers” song by fans at the Croatia match has been denounced in an official report submitted to Uefa by the Fare network, which describes itself as “a unique organisation working to achieve social change through football, tackle discrimination and push for greater diversity and equality”. Clearly, this unique organisation’s primary preoccupation is not football, but “social change”. Its executive director, Piara Powar, told the Telegraph, with reference to “Ten Bombers”: “We would classify it as an ultra-nationalist song that, sung within certain contexts, would be seen as an insult and discriminatory.”

So, what about “Flower of Scotland”, then? Is that not an ultra-nationalist song, harping back to the 14th century and celebrating the bloody defeat of Edward II, sending him homeward to think again? Scots have every right to celebrate the repulse of a ruthless invader; but so have Britons as a whole, with respect to 1940. Since “Ten German Bombers” was originally sung by children it is intrinsically harmless.

For those unfamiliar with this ditty, it is sung to the tune of “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain” and its verses are a variation on “Ten Green Bottles”. Beginning, “There were ten German bombers in the air,” repeated four times, it progresses to “And the RAF from Britain shot one down” and then through ten verses, reducing the number each time, to “There were no more German bombers in the air… ’Cos the RAF from Britain shot them down.” It can be accompanied by miming the motion of aircraft wings with outstretched arms.

So, hardly the most sophisticated composition, but that reflects its invention by schoolchildren. Nobody is suggesting entering it for the Eurovision Song Contest, it is simply a playground ditty, taken up by British troops and later by football supporters. And why not? When men enter a sports stadium, especially a football stadium, they often want to abandon, for ninety minutes, the responsibilities of adulthood and momentarily reclaim their inner schoolboy. Football crowds have never been politically correct; they are robust and competitive, abrasive towards opponents and mocking, often in a tongue-in-cheek style.

The intrusion into that world of mutually licensed antagonism of “anti-discrimination monitors” signals the depths of Orwellian dystopia to which this country is sinking. Football matches routinely begin with players kneeling in deference to the programme of a Marxist organisation. The FA has banned England fans who sang “Ten Bombers” at a previous German match and now the Fare network is urging it to ban those who sang it at the Croatia match: “If the FA wants to find out who’s singing it through seat numbers, it has the means to do that.”

The surveillance society does not get any more sinister than that. (In fact, of course, it does: we shall certainly see even worse aggression against freedom any day now.) Football supporters have always been free spirits; in the past, that sometimes spilled over into downright hooliganism, which is intolerable. But hooliganism in the form of violent behaviour is the province of the police; in a free society we do not need social engineers and anti-discrimination monitors re-educating fans ideologically. It is probably because football supporters represent a culture of virile, uninhibited expression that they are being targeted as an archipelago of independent behaviour standing above the woke tide engulfing Britain.

By any rational standard, it is perfectly reasonable that British football supporters should mock their German rivals with a mild song that glances only peripherally towards the crimes of the Third Reich. That nightmare is not so far away as we are invited to believe. As recently as 2015 a 110lb German bomb from the Blitz was found just 650ft away from Wembley Stadium, requiring evacuation of local residents while the Army rendered it safe.

Wembley epitomised the spirit of the Blitz, with football fans risking their lives to watch their favourite sport. Some clubs had “spotters” who would watch after the air raid alarm sounded, so that play need not be halted until enemy aircraft actually came in sight. The 1941 cup final was played at Wembley at the peak of the Blitz, watched by 60,000 people who saw a late equaliser by Denis Compton award Arsenal a draw against Preston.

One week later, on the night of 10-11 May, the Blitz reached its climax with a massive air raid that set ablaze the Tower of London, Temple Church, the Inns of Court, Lambeth Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the deanery of Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and several railway stations, as well as countless houses and business premises. The bombers left 1,436 people dead and 1,800 seriously injured, some of whom later died; they caused more than 2,100 fires, some of which burned for ten days, and left 12,374 Londoners homeless.

If the grandchildren of those who suffered such carnage offer no more serious reproach to contemporary Germans than a mildly mocking playground song, that is testimony not to “discrimination”, but to a generous-spirited recourse to humour rather than hatred. But in a climate where “anti-discrimination monitors” police the banter of fans at football matches, for the purpose of suppressing it and banning supposed offenders from their favourite game, we need to ask ourselves whether we are now beginning to live in the kind of society we would have experienced if we had let the 1940 invaders in.

German football supporters have often sung “Bomben auf Engeland”, arguably much more offensive since it is a banned Nazi propaganda song from 1940 glorifying the bombing of Britain. Football stadia have never been arenas of good taste: let them sing, but let our fans retaliate with their schoolboy ditty. It is a harmless provocation, like whistling the theme from “The Great Escape” at matches against Germany, an example of British irony and self-parody. It is in the humorous tradition of the film “The Italian Job”, or the television comedy “’Allo ’Allo”, but of course wokery, like every incarnation of Marxism, is uncomprehending of humour.

Despite the triviality of this incident (to grown-up people), there is another much more serious issue: the exponential advance of a totalitarian culture of intolerant control that seeks to reduce all of us, even unruly football supporters, to the status of docile, conformist, consensual automata, like the tightly disciplined crowds hailing the public appearances of the North Korean dictator.

It is particularly regrettable that the thought police should be poisoning the world of sport – and even more so that a once staunchly conservative newspaper such as The Telegraph should report this development approvingly – but the encroaching woke tyranny must be excised from every area of life. Perhaps we need new lyrics. How about “Ten Anti-Discrimination Monitors”? It is not only bombers that can snuff out hard-won freedoms and, unless the sacrifices of 1940 are to be rendered pointless, we must defend our liberties from this latest, woke, aggression.