Bomber

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Others saw it as ‘the most uncivilised means of warfare that the world had known since the Mongol invasions’. Apart from mortally harming the gunner the explosion of the HE shell fractured the metal formers at a place where, after manufacture, the rear part of the fuselage is bolted on. However, the German pilots are not able to prevent the disaster that was about to fall on the small German village.

And so for me, above all else, this magnificent novel gave me startling new insights into my own qualities of compassion and humanity, ones that perhaps I didn't really expect to experience within the confines of a novel about a vicious and savage war. And it’s less than a third of the overall civilian death toll in Japanese cities, which was at least 333,000. He outlived any of his crew, for from 16,000 feet the wireless operator falling at 120 mph (the terminal velocity for his weight) reached the ground ninety seconds later. Having then built up a range of characters in the first half of the book, Deighton then spends the rest of it on the raid and its aftermath.Victor von Löwenherz, a German night fighter pilot who intercepts RAF bombers in his Junkers Ju 88, looks on with horror at the Nazi regime. Essentially the book does two things; it tells personal stories and describes the nuts and bolts of war.

The narrator has a knack of making all the characters; male and female, sound wooden and colourless thus spoiling the story beyond endurance. RAF bombers run the gauntlet of night-fighters and flak guns whilst civilians and firemen deal with the havoc they create on the ground. Today, of course, we can hit power plants and weapons factories and ammunition depots with precision. Burgess also put Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” on his list, and it’s tempting to put “Bomber” and Heller’s classic side by side, as variations on the same theme. Deighton wrote about cooking and worked as an illustrator before publishing his breakthrough bestselling thriller, “ The IPCRESS File, ” in 1962.And, just like the Blitz in London and other English cities (43,000 civilians dead), the attacks had exactly the opposite effect. Len Deighton—one of the masters of twentieth-century espionage fiction—combines his expertise as both historian and novelist in Bomber, the classic World War II novel that relates, in devastating detail, the twenty-four-hour story of an allied bombing raid. Len Deighton brings to life in authentic detail the horror for all involved in the night bombing campaign of WWII. Deighton creates an enormous cast that includes airmen, soldiers, firemen, nurses, doctors, wives and civilians of all descriptions which lends itself to an intricate plot despite the fact that the story is developed within the confines of one day.

The bombing of civilians during wartime and the concept of “collective guilt;” particularly today with events in Gaza is very controversial. Throughout the aerial scenes that Deighton develops, realism is the key allowing the reader to feel that they are aboard RAF or Luftwaffe aircraft. I can think of no other book from the WW2 period that brings home the brutal nature of the reality of war than this. At the beginning of the novel, however, there is spatial separation between the viewpoints, with the chapters alternating between British and Germans. Tellingly Winston Churchill – whose executive decision the British bombing campaign was – blanks it out in his history of the Second World War (for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature – there being no Prize awarded for war).Flight Lieutenant Sweet, Commander of Lambert’s group who believes his underling is too pro-communist. Skilled Royal Air Force bomber pilot Sam Lambert is exhausted, and his veteran crewmen have just been replaced by an inexperienced new team. The bombs are loaded into the Lancasters, the German radars "warm up", and the fighter pilots adjust their night vision. Illustrator Raymond Hawkey (1930-2010) designed the classic 1960's James Bond paperbacks for Pan Books.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Lambert makes the mistake of voicing his socialist opinions and his scepticism about ‘strategic bombing’. On the one hand, the detail is mind-boggling in its rigour, whether it be the exact cost of a Lancaster bomber, the colour of the dashboard lights on a German night fighter or the arrangement of sewage pipes in a German town. This novel bears no resemblance to other, better-known classics like The Naked and the Dead or All Quite on the Western Front. This affords us a unique view, one in which terrible injuries and deaths are described in the same detail as the tactical approach of modern warfare.Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. 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. In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. Sometimes the horror of war is brought home more vividly by almost dispassionately describing the raw facts.