Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Over sixty years on the Bomber War still stirs intense emotions at the loss of so many young airmen’s lives and at the controversial destruction of cities like Dresden. While Bomber Command was pounding Germany by night it was the Flying Fortresses and Liberators of the American Eighth Air Force based on the airfields of East Anglia that had the unenviable task of bombing by day. ‘This not-coming-home business’ one airman called it a one in four chance of completing the 25 missions needed for a return home. Their story is the subject of this magnificent new history. It is partly a strategic history from the first raid by a dozen B-17s on Rouen in summer 1942 to the succession of massed attacks in spring 1945 that pulverised Berlin Leipzig and Dresden. It shows how a successful bombing plan evolved out of terrible losses on missions like the notorious Schweinfurt-Regensburg Raid but required the introduction of long-range fighter escorts of Mustangs and Thunderbolts to transform the numbers returning. By January 1945 before a single soldier had crossed the Rhine the German economy was in ruins and defeat was inevitable. As Donald Miller puts it air power alone did not win the war but the war could not have been won without it. In confronting the moral issue that has never gone away – was it ethically defensible to bomb civilians as most of the aircrews indeed knew they were doing? Miller makes clear that the bomber campaign did destroy the morale of the German people: the problem was that they had no option but to work on and hope to survive. But whereas the RAF’s ‘Bomber’ Harris believed in ‘city busting’ – blasting and burning centres of population night after night as Eighth Air Force shows the Americans’ strategy of bombing oil refineries factories and rail hubs was far more effective though still causing heavy civilian casualties. (MP)