– In one of the epic campaigns of the Second World War, Britain’s Bomber Command carried the offensive to the heart of Germany when, in the early dark days of the war, the British had nothing else with which to strike back. By the end of the war 56,000 British and Commonwealth aircrew and nearly 500,000 Germans died in the course of the R.A.F.’s attempt to win the war by bombing. The struggle began in 1939 with a handful of primitive Whitleys, Hampdens, and Wellingtons groping blindly through the darkness over Europe. These bombers proved tragically inadequate for the missions proposed against a background of twenty years of theory and propaganda about the invincibility of strategic bombing. It ended six years later with 1600 Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Mosquitoes, equipped with the ultimate devices of Britain’s wartime high technology, razing whole cities in a single night. Max Hastings has traced the development of massive are bombing, from the fierce controversies between Churchill and his air marshals and scientists to the great raids on the Ruhr, Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden, with a wealth of contemporary documents, letters, and diaries, many of them hitherto unpublished. He has interviewed key surviving witnesses, including Sir Arthur Harris and his staff officers and Group commanders, to assemble a remarkable portrait of the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command and his direction of the bomber offensive. To tell the story of the airmen who flew these appalling missions, Max Hastings chose six squadrons at different periods of the war, and sought out more than a hundred survivors to reconstruct their memories. BOMBER COMMAND is not only a searingly realistic account of the price paid by the British to sustain the bomber offensive; it is also a pitiless reexamination of what the bomber could and could not accomplish in six years of total war.
Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939-45
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Author: Hastings, Max
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN:
Details:
Author: Hastings, Max
Brand: Dial Press/James Wade
Edition: 1st
Features:
- Hard Cover Book with dust jacket
Binding: Hardcover
Format: Box set
Number Of Pages: 399
Release Date: 01-01-1979
Languages: English
Package Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
