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This is a selection of ten remarkable true accounts of unusual incidents and happenings to Bomber Command aircrew during World War Two. It covers operations of varying natures, such as one of the first leaflet dropping raids during the 'Phoney War' when the elderly Whitley bomber proved to be a nightmare on long flights and when the crews suffered more from lack of oxygen and heating than from enemy action. The fascinating story of a famous MP who used his influence to become a tail gunner at the age of 55 and who lost his life trying to stop German Panzers before Dunkirk proves remarkable reading and a famous name in cricket, Bill Edrich, recounts his days flying low-level daylight raids in Bristol Blenheims during 1941. Then there is a young New Zealander, Jimmy Ward, who climbed out onto a Wellington bomber's wing at considerable altitude to extinguish an engine fire and how despite his own modesty he was awarded a VC. Other stories tell of amazing escapes from burning aircraft, the heroism of aircrew who sacrificed their own lives so that others may survive and how a mid-upper gunner took the controls of a Mitchell B-25 to pilot her safely home.
Bomber combat crews faced a wide array of perils as they flew over German territory. Bursts of heavy flak could tear the wings from their planes in a split second. Flaming bullets from German fighter planes could explode their fuel tanks, cut their oxygen supplies, destroy their engines. Thousands of young men were shot, blown up, or thrown from their planes five miles above the earth; and even those who returned faced the subtler dangers of ice and fog as they tried to land their battered aircraft back home.The winter of 1944 was the most dangerous time to be a combat airman in RAF Bomber Command. The chances of surviving a tour were as low as one in five, and morale had finally hit rock bottom. In this comprehensive history of the air war that year, Kevin Wilson describes the most dangerous period of the Battle of Berlin, and the unparalleled losses over Magdeburg, Leipzig and Nuremberg.Men of Air reveals how these ordinary men coped with the extraordinary pressure of flying, the loss of their colleagues, and the threat of death or capture. Brilliantly placing these stories within the context of The Great Escape, D-Day, the defeat of the V1 menace, and more, Wilson shows how the sheer grit and determination of these "Men of Air" finally turned the tide against the Germans.
In April 1943 Lady Be Good, an American Liberator bomber, vanished into the night while returning to base at Benghazi, Libya, following a mission to Naples, Italy. All Attempts to find the aircraft and her crew proved unsuccessful, and they became, just one more casualty of the war. Fifteen years later, oil geologists spotted the bomber's remarkably well-preserved remains from the air some 400 miles southeast of Benghazi. Reports to American and British authorities provoked no interest. The investigation and reconstruction of the ill-fated mission was left to geologist Don Sheridan, who led a survey party to the plane and eventually located the crew and evidence of their desperate attempt to survive in the forbidding desert environment. Fascinated by rumours of the tragedy, Mario Martinez spent years attempting to find out exactly what happened. His account of the mystery is riveting. An intriguing piece of detective work, the story he has put together tells of the crew's courageous efforts to save themselves. It is a story with broad appeal, as evidenced by the popularity of a television documentary broadcast when this book was first published in 1995. *
— Previously unpublished personal diaries reveal the day-to-day life of British aircrews during the Second World War, based on their personal diaries, which were written at the time — Revisiting a revised look at a popular out of print publication with fresh material such as new characters and chapters — Historically rich in detail with previously unpublished photographs of many of the characters involved — A welcome return of an updated version of a book first published over thirty years During the Second World War, thousands of young men volunteered for service with the RAF. Some became fighter pilots, but a great many more were destined to be trained as bomber aircrew – pilots, navigators, wireless operators, bomb aimers, gunners and flight engineers. On completion of their training, a number of these recruits were posted to XV Squadron, a highly-regarded frontline bomber squadron, which had been formed during the First World War. Bomber Squadron: Men Who Flew with XV Squadron relates the personal stories of a small number of these men, giving an insight to their anxious moments when flying on operational sorties, staring death in the face in the form of prowling night-fighters and ground fire, and relaxing during their off-duty hours. The book also reveals the motivations, emotions and personal attitudes of these men who flew into combat on an almost nightly basis. Their stories encompass the whole six years of the war where XV Squadron flew various bomber types, including Fairey Battles, Bristol Blenheims, Vickers Wellingtons, Short Stirlings and Avro Lancasters.
Martin Bowman’s considerable experience as a military historian has spanned over forty years, during which time he has amassed a wealth of material on the participation by RAF and Commonwealth and US 8th and 15th Air Force crews in the series of raids on the cities and oil transportation and industrial targets in the Third Reich, culminating in ‘Round-the-Clock’ bombing by the RAF, operating at night on the largely forgotten Stirling, the gamely Halifax and ultimately the more successful Lancaster, and the US 8th Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator crews by day on a target list so long and wide ranging that it defies the imagination. Hundreds of hours of painstaking and fact-finding research and interviews and correspondence with numerous airmen and women and their relatives, in Britain, America and beyond has been woven into a highly readable and emotional outpouring of life and death in combat over the Third Reich as the men of the RAF and Commonwealth and American air forces describe in their own words the compelling, gripping and thought-provoking narrative of the Combined Bomber Offensive in World War Two, which resulted from the RAF nocturnal onslaught and the American unescorted precision attacks on targets throughout the Reich until the P-51 Mustang escort fighters enabled the 8th to assume the mantle of the leading bombing partner in theatre. February and March 1945 saw the most intense bombing destruction when Nazi defences were minimal or absent and the war was all but over. Final victory in May 1945 came at a high price indeed. Half of the U.S. Army Air Forces' casualties in World War II were suffered by Eighth Air Force, with in excess of 47,000 casualties, with more than 26,000 dead. RAF Bomber Command lost 55,573 men killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew and 8,403 wounded in action while 9,838 became prisoners of war. RAF and American bomber crews could, therefore be forgiven for thinking they had won a pyrrhic victory; one that had taken such a heavy toll that negated any true sense of achievement, though, if nothing else, the human effort spent by RAF Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force did pave the way for the Soviet victory in the east.
Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published. Here are the horror and heroism of World War II in the words of the men who fought it, the journalists who covered it, and the civilians who were caught in its fury. Miller gives us an up-close, deeply personal view of a war that was more savagely fought—and whose outcome was in greater doubt—than readers might imagine. This is the war that Americans at the home front would have read about had they had access to the previously censored testimony of the soldiers on which Miller builds his gripping narrative. Miller covers the entire war—on land, at sea, and in the air—and provides new coverage of the brutal island fighting in the Pacific, the bomber war over Europe, the liberation of the death camps, and the contributions of African Americans and other minorities. He concludes with a suspenseful, never-before-told story of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, based on interviews with the men who flew the mission that ended the war.
Bruce Lewis brings this book together to tell the story of the men who flew the bombers. The different roles within the aircraft are covered and each of their unique experiences discussed through first hand accounts.
A “truly compelling” (Good Morning America) New York Times bestseller that explores how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war—from the creator and host of the podcast Revisionist History. In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?” Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.