Product Description

A Bomber Command classic depicting the deep feelings associated with the human cost of the air war in World War II.

This is the breathtaking story of a wartime bomber crew facing the hazards of bombing strongly defended targets. A navigator with the RAAF based at Elsham Wolds, Charlwood writes sympathetically and understandingly of the hopes and fears of the crews as squadron losses mounted

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124851 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

The most moving account of Bomber Command Ops I have read
This account of an Australian Navigator's experiences during a tour of 30 Operations in WW2 is the most moving and descriptive account I have read. The book concentrates on the individual and the toll that the raids over Germany took both on the person and the larger RAF community. It decribes in detail through honest words the fear that the aircrew were exposed to, night after night and the reality that the odds against their survival were against them. It does not take much imagination to place yourself in the frame of a Lancaster as it sets out across the North Sea with a crew of men all thinking similar thoughts with the full knowledge that you may not return. I would recommend this book to anybody who wants an impression of what it was really like to face a tour of Operations in Bomber Command during WW2.

Utterly Compelling Reading
Don Charlwood's account of life in Bomber Command Aircrews is first rate. I could not put the book down. He covers the raids and tells it like it was. He tells of a cool dedicated professionalism where unpleasant deaths happened almost every night. No-one flinched. No-one asked to drop out. They knew they stood little chance of survival. The searchlights, flak and nightfighters lay in wait over Essen, Duisburg, Berlin but still they kept flying. More good friends disappeared each time.
Despite the carnage Charlwood maintains his essential humanity and convinces of the rightness of his cause. For a reader who wants to know what it was like to take on an implacable foe in world war 2, this is the book!

A debt owed
''What are the losses on each raid?'
'They say five per cent.'
"Five per cent and we do thirty ops.' He considered this thoughtfully. 'We sort of end up owing something.'

I believe we owe a great debt to the brave boys of Bomber Command who knew they were unlikely to survive. This account from an Australian sergeant navigator tells you what it was like to fly over Germany from Lincolnshire, to kill and probably to die. The author's crew were the first in seven months to actually complete a thirty flight tour of operations from their airfield. In 1941 he had trained with twenty compatriots. 18 were destined for Bomber Command. At the end of the war 12 were dead and one a prisoner. It was, he says, an average group. I am ashamed that my country never gave the airmen of Bomber Command a campaign medal.

Here you really get a feel of what it was like to be so young with no more ambition that to reach your next short leave. Wartime romance is related and the discovery of the village his family came from and his ancestors' graves.

The first time my parents saw the house where I was to grow up, there was a Halifax bomber crashed outside. I played as a boy in the peaceful ruins of the disused former bomber airfield from which men like Charlwood had flown less than ten years before. A different world so well narrated in this book.