Bomber
Len Deighton, Richard Burnip (Narrator), Malcolm Gladwell (Introduction)
This book was among a list of audiobooks recommended me by Hoopla when I cast about for bedtime listening.
The Valour and the Horror was a 1992 mini-series created by the McKenna Brothers, the second 2-hr. episode: Death by Moonlight: Bomber Command featured an account that echoes the sentiments presented here. The Royal Canadian Legion was outraged and vigorously panned the presentation as defaming a Knighted hero proving that one man's villain is another's hero.
First published in 1970 when Gladwell was aged seven.
Atrocities are in the eye of the beholder, or the recorder of history. The enemy commits them, the winners did what was necessary to gain victory.
Like the line that the ground crew own the aircraft, they only loan them to the pilots. [The penalty for non-return is often death or enemy capture.]
The story line switches back and forth between the British flyers and their air bases and the towns and cities they try to defend and the German flyers and their similar bases and towns. The account is rather clinical lacking in emotional response to the devastation being reigned down upon civilians in the streets and shelters.
The author doesn't choose sides in dispassionately describing bombing and the fighter planes that attacked and defended the bombers. And in explaining the destruction, deaths, and injuries that were inflicted on the ground and the infrastructure burned or blown up.
There are no winners in war, only those whose losses are greater.
Note that the recording is 24 hours long.
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