Bomber

Product Information

While in New York City working as a magazine illustrator he began writing his first novel, ‘The Ipcress File’, which was published in 1962. The book has recently been reissued depicting an RAF Squadron in devastating detail over a 24 hour period, June 31, 1943, a date the author created. RAF bombers run the gauntlet of night-fighters and flak guns whilst civilians and firemen deal with the havoc they create on the ground. A book that you develop an emotional chord for as you read it--perhaps this is why it is hard to let these works go into cardboard boxes and out on a curb.

Outside Europe and Japan, most people who give any thought to the Allies’s bombing missions in World War II think first, if not only, of the nuclear weapons that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Based on the classic novel by Len Deighton, Bomber tells the story of the bombing war in Europe through the prism of a single Bomber Command raid one night in 1943.The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. This is an astonishingly accomplished piece of writing that kept me gripped for all of its 21 hours.

To be honest, I am glad it took me so long to finally read this book because I don't think the younger version of "me" was ready to fully comprehend the brutal honesty of war that is depicted by Deighton in 'Bomber'. Deighton’s detail is exceptional, from the Operations room, mental and mechanical preparations of the pilots, strategies, aircraft design and capabilities. Thankfully, Bomber livens up a bit once the planes are airborne, about halfway through the five hundred pages. For the author one of his goals was to convey the dehumanizing effects of mechanical warfare, a goal he clearly achieved. It details the methods used to create the most destruction and loss of life amongst the civilian targets, there is little pretense about military targets.

The book also serves as one of the most effectively subversive and persuasive anti-war essays of all time - if not the finestThis is a complex read, with dozens of characters and quite dense technical detail in parts. The ten consisted of three trilogies, beginning with Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match from 1983 to 1985, and a prequel.

The common factor is that they all clash in the skies over western Europe, or on the ground of western Europe if you are on the wrong side of explosives. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Skilled Royal Air Force bomber pilot Sam Lambert is exhausted, and his veteran crewmen have just been replaced by an inexperienced new team. In Series One of Ninety-Nine Novels, we learnt about authors including James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Iris Murdoch, V.Brittain was a novelist, a prominent member of London’s cultural scene, and when she referred to the British public’s acquiescence as a failure of imagination, she was locating the failure, at least in part, with the community she belonged to: the custodians of the national imagination. Thousands upon thousands of warriors and civilians on both sides died horrible deaths and in a war that was, without a doubt, hell on earth. Christian Himmel, a twenty-two year old experienced German pilot who steals and leaks information concerning “freezing” experiments of Jews at Dachau to assist German aviators who were shot down in freezing climates. The pilot], still strapped into the pilot’s seat and aghast at his incontinence, hit the earth (along with the front of the fuselage, two Rolls-Royce engines and most of the main spar) some four minutes after that. Dust wrapper supplied in archive acetate film protection, it does not adhere to the book or to the dust wrapper.

It is about 24 hours in the life of an airbase that runs bombing raids over Germany at the end of WW2. Deighton describes people in love, people hating each other, people that are experts at what they do and people that are novices or just incompetent. But what is hardest of all to understand is that these raids were launched to weaken the will of their enemies in Germany and Japan.I can’t resist quoting this little bit, where Deighton is describing an RAF intelligence officer at the base where half the book is situated: Flying Officer Longfellow, graduate of Cambridge and middling novelist. Definitely a testament to the bravery of the RAF bomber crews who relentlessly push on night after night against all odds as well as the German night fighter interceptors who try to destroy them. Roger Ebert used to quote the filmmaker Truffaut for the proposition that it is impossible to make an anti-war film.