The Bombers

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{detailed description}The strategic bombing of Germany by the Royal Air Force remains the most controversial campaign of the Second World War. Its price in human life, both British and German, was prodigious, causing it to be compared —wrongly, Norman Longmate argues—to such military disasters as the Somme and Passchendaele. Eventually more men and women were employed in the aircraft factories than were producing munitions for the Army and Navy combined.
Norman Longmate, through painstaking research into both primary and secondary sources, and interviews with many of the leading figures involved, including Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris and, from the German side, Albert Speer, has revealed fresh material and provided new insights into the bombing offensive. Using contemporary publications and official documents only recently released, he shows how the situation appeared to those in charge at the time and how and why the British public was systematically deceived about what was being done in its name. He explains how the whole area bombing strategy had its origins in and after the First World War, when the R.A.F. fought a desperate battle for independence, and how, in the Second World War, the offensive acquired a momentum of its own, inspired by Churchill's trusted but flawed adviser, Lord Cherwell, and encouraged by the Prime Minister himself.
The R.A.F.'s successes, like the devastation of Hamburg, are fully described, as well as its failures, like the catastrophic attack on Nuremberg, but as readers of Norman Longmate's earlier books will expect, the human side of the story is also given full play. Here in the words of eye-witnesses, often written at the time, one can discover what it felt like to deliver and also to be at the receiving end of the R.A.F.'s 'cookies' and 'blockbusters'. The role of the ground crews, so often neglected, is here given proper weight at last.
The book ends with a careful, balanced analysis of what the offensive ultimately achieved and whether the price paid for it, in moral as well as monetary and military terms, was justified. At once concise and comprehensible, readable and authoritative, The Bombers seems certain to become the standard one-volume work on its subject.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Norman Longmate
published by Hutchinson 1983 1st edn. 416pp illustrated, index 15x23
{condition}very good, inc. d/j
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