Bomber

Rating:
Summary: The finest anti-war novel ever written
Review: Deighton is at his best here in a subtle blend of fact and fiction that charts the lives (and in many cases, the deaths) of British and German characters in the air and on the ground. The novel spans a 24 hour period in 1943, as the Allied aerial bombing campaign was reaching its height and the outcome of World War 2 hung in the balance

The book can be read and re-read on many levels. 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. As an accessible documentary of the campaign, Deighton is unflinchingly accurate in blending fact with the necessary mechanics of characterisation. The book also serves as one of the most effectively subversive and persuasive anti-war essays of all time - if not the finest

This is a complex read, with dozens of characters and quite dense technical detail in parts. This, however, inspires concentration and repeated re-reading which constantly reveals new layers and depth of meaning. Deighton has never surpassed himself

If the main text is chillingly effective, then the Epilogue is a heart stopper. Deighton brings the story up to date (at the time of writing) and the fates of those who survived 1943 are vividly captured in the most evocative and sparing writing style of all.

Now, those who flew the bombers and those who fought and loved them are mostly gone, with none of the survivors under 75. Soon this book and a very few others will serve as an epitaph to a time when Europe was a battlegound where everyone, of all ages and races, civilian and miltary, was plunged into a lottery of life and death.

Rating:
Summary: A Direct Hit!
Review: Deighton's "Bomber" is a gripping and moving story that delivers a most important message to the reader. This is my 2nd book by Deighton, and a couple of things are becoming very clear to me about this author:

Deighton's character development is absolutely superb. An entire host of characters on both sides of the English Channel are painted in vivid color. And the characters evolve.

Dieghton's attention to detail is beyond fascination. Details regarding people, places, planes, tactics, technology, etc... makes this book a historical novel of the period almost without compare. And this detail adds a realism that ultimately draws the reader into understanding that this is not a fairy tale of honor and heroism, but a horrific reality.

The message, though never spoken or even hinted at directly, is that war is a horrific thing. And as an anti-war book, it rivals Vonnegut's SlaughterHouse V or Hersey's Hiroshima.

Deighton is an author with few rivals, and this book stands as one of the greatest condemnations of war as well as a historical novel of signifigance.

Rating:
Summary: The air war over Germany-from both sides
Review: In this meticulously researched and finely-wrought novel, author Len Deighton interweaves the stories of a large cast of characters, German and British, in the hours leading up to a night bomber attack on a fictional Germany city. Due to crew error, a small German town is accidentally bombed by part of the bomber force. The story revolves around the men who fly the heavy British bombers, the men on the ground in Germany who must deal with the carnage of the bombs, and the German airmen and radar men who try to stop the bombers short of their tragic attack. Deighton writes that he read over 200 books to prepare for this novel. He also interviewed many British and German veterans and civilians and flew in most of the planes described in the book. The result is a book that favors neither side but instead focuses on the individual humanity of the characters, with all their strengths and weaknesses. Thousands upon thousands of warriors and civilians on both sides died horrible deaths and in a war that was, without a doubt, hell on earth. Though there is no glory in war, the book is filled with individual acts of selflessness and heroism that elevate the participants above the slaughter. Their heroism is not without great price, though, from the fireman battling the blazes to the British pilot who fights to bring his plane home only to suffer a breakdown, and the German pilot who is being hunted down for disagreeing with Nazi policy. I highly recommend this book. It is a must-read especially for those who desire to learn more about the air war over Germany.

Rating:
Summary: A valuable horror story
Review: It's a pity this book has been relegated to the status of 'special order'. As an account of a single Lancaster night raid, it's without peer in portraying the lives of people enduring the horrors of war in any age. Deighton's skill at depicting characters has few matches, and the scope of this book, set in both Germany and England [as well as the skies above both] only enhances his writing abilities. Following the lives of bomber and night fighter crews as well as those living under bombardment, he shows how meaningless war is to the most hawkish adherents. It's not possible to read this book without being moved by how well Deighton sees into the minds and hearts of his characters. None of them are false or overdrawn.

'Strategic' bombing was implemented to maintain pressure on the Nazis in the hope of forcing sufficient discontent among the population. John Dos Passos once wrote on the futility of using 'terror' bombing to bring surrender of a people whose loved ones were killed and their homes destroyed. Bomber shows how barren this strategy truly was. It didn't work when London was blitzed. It certainly failed when even target cities were missed completely due to unforeseen circumstances. Deighton takes us step by step from the preparation of the aircraft and the defenses countering it through the raid and its aftermath. His portrayal of the 'military mind' is disconcerting when we reflect that the same attitudes prevail with little or no evidence of improvement. This book should be brought back on the active list and read by anyone seeing armed conflict as a mechanism of policy.

Rating:
Summary: Great, Well Researched Look at WWII Air War from Both Sides!
Review: The best fictional account of the "Other Side's" (German) view of being the "attacked". Mr. Deighton obviously has done his homework in showing how one massive,confused attack on a German town in the Summer of 1943 devastates everyone involved from the British RAF planners and pilots, politicians, and even more the German civilian home front, not to mention just about everyone else on the German side,from the SS,Luftwaffe, to the totally innocent on the ground. When the air raid alarms go off in the ficticious German town to the inevitable,terrifying end, mistakes and all, you know you're reading from a master. The ending is as terrible as you can imagine...

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Panel Novel
Review: This is a superbly plotted panel book in which every story ends with some sort of twist or irony. I write only to correct one error made by an earlier reviewer. Lambert's plane is NOT 'Joe for King', but 'the Creaking Door'. The CO is so out of touch that he mistakes the planes, thereby indirectly saving Lambert's life, much to his young wife's relief. (The casualty rates were horrific for bomber crews.)

It is somewhat amusing that the reviewer made the same mistake.

Rating:
Summary: Epic story of the WWII airwar
Review: Though the title implies that this is the story of a single bomber crew over Germany in 1943, "Bomber" goes farther - much farther, only starting with the crew of the heavy bomber "Joe for King". Deighton proceeds to cover the families of the crew, other crew members and their superiors before cutting across the channel to the enemy - night-fighter pilots, their controllers in German air defense, various suspicious characters from across the spectrum of Germany's military - from "respectable" Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht personnel to shadowy types from the "Abwehr" and the SS. We also meet the civilian residents of Altgarten, a Ruhr-area town nobody would think of bombing, but which manages to get plastered all the same. It's mid-summer 1943, when "Joe for King" is sent into the Ruhr as part of a massive night-time raid against the industrial centers of Krefeld. Lacking night-vision goggles, RAF pilots drop their bombs on targets marked by flares left by directing aircraft - in this case, specially equipped Mosquitoe night-fighters. When the marking aircraft for the Krefeld raid is shot down too early, its flares are released over Altgarten. This error is compounded by inherent flaws in RAF tactics (like targeting bombs in the center of cities, where bombs are more likely to hit civilian homes than factories and military installations), and the town becomes the unintended target for the massive strike. "Bomber" is to RAF's wartime bomber command what "Traffic" is to the DEA - a story of massive scale borne by wide cast if characters that never stops growing. Deighton doesn't let something meaningless as nationality get in the way of determining who is good or evil (the Germans get the bombs here, but Nazi genocide also gets prominent mention, with plenty of nasty Waffen SS to remind us why people were fighting). On the British side, we see officers acting less like gentlemen than soldiers. Political correctness is the rule (this is the country that gave us "1984"; "Joe for King"'s commander is suspected of incipient Bolshevism - it's very name hints at Stalin). Those who won't fall in line risk being labeled as LMF (Lacking Moral Fiber) - officially branded as cowards. Though books with such a command of detail normally favor the efforts of those they depict, Deighton is uniformly negative on the subject, a tone reinforced by his many subplots. Lambert, "Joe for King's" rebel pilot, plays the best cricket in Bomber Command - leading his odious superior to compel his participation in an upcoming tournament on pain of getting LMF'd. (Worse - the commander puts pressure on Mrs. Lambert after her husband has departed for the big raid). The bombers fly from Warley Fen, a once verdant field seized from its original owners who now stare at the airfield, mourning for what they know they will never have again. In Germany, ADF is managed by August Bach, an aged warrior preparing to marry his young son's nanny, not knowing how her youthful looks have made her the target of vicious rumors through Altgarten. The pilots of a night-fighter squadron (nichtjagdeschwader), preparing for a feared RAF attack on the Ruhr, are thrown into turmoil when Abwehr and Gestapo appear in search of a stolen classifed memo. The memo, it turns out, details hypothermia experiments on concentration camp prisoners (this may be same memo mentioned early in Robert Harriss' superb "Fatherland"). The corrupt assistant to Altgarten's Burgomeister arranges for the downgrading of the town's remaining Jews (from 1/3rd to 2/3rd "Jewishness" - though these jews are even more likely to face deportation and certain death, they will have greater freedom to marry other jews). Altgarten itself is flooded with profiteers funneling goods looted from conquered parts of Russia and the Netherlands. It seems that war is the only thing keeping the world safe because it occupies all the amoral typed who have to fight it. The only morally just adults are the TENO - the civil safety personnel who dig people out of bombed buildings. Because they are stationed in Altgarten, they get the biggest break: when the raid comes, they have the shortest commute. With so much going on, you just know you're bound to miss something. This is the sort of book that speed-readers hate. You'll probably lose count of all the characters that Deighton throws at you, though this doesn't hurt the plot as much as make the book one you'll want to re-read. Be warned - once you pick up bomber, you'll probably be spoiled for any other novel on the war in the skies over Europe.