Bomber

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Deighton describes people in love, people hating each other, people that are experts at what they do and people that are novices or just incompetent. The stonework continued to expand until, with an earth-shaking roar, it released the roof upon the burning interior.

Deighton does well in creating background biographies for all the major characters he introduces which provides insight into their emotions and reactions to the war, air combat preparations, and human relationships. It is the fictionalised account of "the events relating to the last flight of an RAF Bomber over Germany on the night of June 31st, 1943", [1] a deliberately non-existent date, in which an RAF bombing raid on the Ruhr area of western Germany goes wrong. The book also serves as one of the most effectively subversive and persuasive anti-war essays of all time - if not the finestThis is a complex read, with dozens of characters and quite dense technical detail in parts. Original unclipped dust wrapper is also smart with light shelf wear and minor chipping to the extremities.Deighton tackles many themes in a subtle manner to include class warfare, sexism, bigotry and technology. He once wrote that it “should be unambiguously stated” that the RAF’s goal was “the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany … the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale. For Deighton the RAF is as class-ridden as the Bullingdon Society (Harry Palmer, the prole MI5 agent in The Ipcress File, makes the same Deightonish point). Book, Pages age toning , jacket edges insect nibbled, with rear flap almost detached, now in a new protective sleeve holding it all in position. Neither are the citizens without flaws, as they funnel stolen and looted goods into their own pockets.

Lambert's refusals to do so causes his flight commander, an ambitious and unscrupulous flight lieutenant, to force him out of flying by replacing Lambert's best crewmen with poor performers. It’s easier for a novel to take anti-war stance, and the most famous war novels – such as the aforementioned All Quiet on the Western Front – do just that. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil.

The only other minor issue I had with it was the use of German terms that were often never explained what they are in English.

The bombing of civilians during wartime and the concept of “collective guilt;” particularly today with events in Gaza is very controversial. Deighton continuously points to the experiences of German soldiers and aviators on the eastern front which creates a great deal of sarcasm and anti-Nazi commentary among those who survived Stalin’s armies. Because it’s obvious from the outset that something will go very wrong on the bombing mission that’s the centerpiece of the story. Bomber was announced, on 1 February 2010, as one of twenty-one titles longlisted for the " Lost Man Booker Prize" of 1970, a contest delayed by 40 years because a reshuffling of the fledgeling competition's rules that year disqualified nearly a year's worth of high-quality fiction from consideration. Long before this, another HE shell passed through the elevator hinge-bracket on the tail and blew part of the servo trim tab assembly into the rear turret with such force that it decapitated the rear gunner.For the author one of his goals was to convey the dehumanizing effects of mechanical warfare, a goal he clearly achieved. Deighton has never surpassed himselfIf the main text is chillingly effective, then the Epilogue is a heart stopper. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

An RAF bomber, its captain leading a green crew, set out on their mission to the Ruhr Valley in Germany. The enormous success of his first spy novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following decades. Deighton highlights in great detail the respective preparations of the RAF attackers, and the Luftwaffe crews intent on defence. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It focuses on an RAF attack on a German city of Krefeld that went wrong resulting in the bombing of the village of Altgarten and the German pilots who met them in the air.It is a first rate thriller, and the reader's inevitable prejudices are soon set aside as the terrible cost to mind and body escalates. I have always found this the hardest of Deighton's novels to get into, partly because it is so unrelentingly serious, but mainly because its beginning is poor. As for his writing, it's smooth as always, but the glibness he displays in his spy novels here becomes an unsettling detachment as he describes the dismemberment, disembowelment, and disintegration of characters with whom the reader has just spent the last several hundred pages.