Product Description

First published under the pseudonym of Flying Officer X, H E Bates's heroic stories of the exploits of British pilots during the Second World War created a sensation when they appeared in 1942, selling over two million copies all over the world. This book is a one-volume edition of these stories, which first appeared under the titles of "The Greatest People in the World" and "How Secret the Brave". While writing them, Bates lived among the often painfully young bomber crews and recorded their lives both in combat and on the ground with a poignancy that deeply moved the generation that lived through the war. These tales are immensely readable as an account of the R.A.F. in war time, reflecting Bates's mastery both of the art of description and of storytelling.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #505682 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
'He was without an equal in England in the kind of story he had made his own and stood in the direct line of succession of fiction writers of the English countryside that includes George Eliot, Hardy and D. H. Lawrence' The Times

Customer Reviews

Classic pen portraits of the WWII in the air
This collection of short stories about life in the RAF in wartime was first published in 1942 under the psuedonym of "Flying Officer X" and sold more than two million copies.

H.E. Bates was rediscovered by a new generation of readers when his delightful and harmless comedies about the Larkin family, beginning with "The Darling Buds of May" were televised, kick starting the career of a teenage Catherine Zeta Jones. But he began his writing career with much darker material while serving in the RAF. These stories stand as an eyewitness account of what it was like to be part of a great and terrible conflict.

Some of these stories are light hearted but most are very sombre: for example "It's just the way it is" describes the interview between the Wing Commander at a base and the grieving parents who have come to ask for more details of how their son died.

The stories are all the more powerful because they are based on real events and you never know how they are going to end. Even where names have been changed or left out, all the stories have the ring of truth, which usually accompanies evewitness accounts of things which happened to real human beings. When you read the story of a damaged aircraft limping back to base having been shot full of holes by German fire, and wonder whether they will make it. The writing almost makes you feel like you had been there.

The last flight of one particular plane obviously made enough of an impression on Bates that he refers to it in two separate stories. In the second of these, Bates describes the demeanour of her pilot, after the aircraft lasted just long enough to get him and the rest of her crew back to ground alive before literally collapsing on the runway just after everyone had got out. The following morning the pilot went back for a final look at his wrecked aircraft. Bates wrote "It seemed even possible that he was looking at something he could not see. It was like the attitude of a seaman who looks across empty water, for the last time, and sees his ship no longer there."

One aspect of the stories which may bring the modern reader up short is that, despite the Peter Jones cover showing an RAF Hurrcane which has just downed a German Heinkel 111 bomber, the people involved in almost all of these stories are the crews who flew or maintained RAF bombers, usually Stirlings.

Without even realising it, when we think of RAF wartime heroes we usually imagine fighter pilots, with the subtext that they protected British women and children from nazi bombers. Unless we are unavoidably confronted with it, we prefer not to think about the fact that another part of the battle against the nazis involved RAF and USAF bombers knocking hell out of German cities.

From the perspective of H.E. Bates and people who were living through the war, that kind of mental sanitisation is not present. The horror of a war in which women and children are likely to be hit by the bombs of both sides is vividly brought home. In the middle of one account of a British bomber on a raid over Germany, Bates describes how a german air raid a few weeks before had shattered the family of one of the crew, and how he had carried the dead body of his little daughter from the ruins of a house wrecked by German bombers. The story is all the more biting because, in his reserved English way, Bates leaves to the reader's imagination what that man was feeling as he prepared to drop bombs on a german city.

This book is unforgettable.