Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War [Hardcover]

Daniel Swift (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374273316 | ISBN-13: 978-0374273316 | Publication Date: August 17, 2010 | Edition: First Edition

In early June 1943, James Eric Swift, a pilot with the 83rd Squadron of the Royal Air Force, boarded his Lancaster bomber for a night raid on Münster and disappeared.

Widespread aerial bombardment was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First: a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss. Just as the trenches produced the most remarkable poetry of the First World War, so too did the bombing campaigns foster a haunting set of poems during the Second.

In researching the life of his grandfather, Daniel Swift became engrossed with the connections between air war and poetry. Ostensibly a narrative of the author’s search for his lost grandfather through military and civilian archives and in interviews conducted in the Netherlands, Germany, and England, Bomber County is also an examination of the relationship between the bombing campaigns of World War II and poetry, an investigation into the experience of bombing and being bombed, and a powerful reckoning with the morals and literature of a vanished moment.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this elegant memoir, Swift traces the interstices between the bombers of the Royal Air Force, his grandfather's service before his death at the age of 30, and selected passages from Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and other writers working during World War II. Meticulously researched, Bomber County chronicles the London Blitz and bombing raids in Germany without elegizing or romanticizing the era. Notes from logs kept by crews mingle with the author's recollection of his grandfather and oral accounts of survivors and family members, reinforcing Swift's belief that "archives are cathedrals, holy houses where may be answered even the hardest human loss." Among the more unusual discoveries to be found within is the author's acceptance of the mythology associated with his tale; psychological warfare often lead to unreliable perceptions of scale, and the author admits that "even as I write this a small doubt still holds" about his grandfather's fate. With its inherent tension and quiet moments of deliberation, the subject of bombing is well-suited to the literary memoir, and Swift renders a potentially narrow slice of history with warmth and sophistication.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

The literature of World War II has seen countless books covering just about every aspect of war imaginable, though few, if any, explore the poetry of air bombing. Using as his starting point a visit to his grandfather's grave and uncovering the man's story through documents, interviews, and histories, including W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, Swift succeeds in combining memoir, history, literary criticism, and biography--no easy matter. "I think I wanted to tell a story, and [my grandfather] was available" he writes, and he nimbly juggles the two very different parallel story lines. Although the story could have gotten away from him, Swift explains away the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of his grandfather's life and death with the poetry of annihilation. Swift writes well and with great insight, and the poetry becomes a lens through which he views the war's more complicated and poignant legacy.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 17, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374273316
• ISBN-13: 978-0374273316
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #866,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars HAUNTING, PROVOCATIVE, REMARKABLE, October 8, 2010

By 

41 Mike - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War (Hardcover)

This book is a gift.

Sifting through the dust of 67 years, Swift (the grand-son) helps his Dad mourn for HIS Dad, 30 year old Eric Swift who perished on June 12, 1943 at the height of WW2.

Swift's work is transporting, evocative and so very, very sad. He examines diaries of young RAF fliers, killed in the war and the reader wonders when was the last time anyone picked up these papers and will anyone evr pick them up again? As the mists of time swirl around the "Good War" one has to also wonder---"Did it all really happen?" "Were there really such men as the valiant, pure-hearted Eric Swift?" "Is it even possible that these men might have been actual war criminals?" "Terroists? (remember that old line about a terroist is someone who owns a bomb but has no airplane?)"

A wonderfully complex and dense memorial to the places, the people and the events of 67 years ago---or is it a memorial to us, our bravehearts, our time?

Read it slowly--bring a highlighter to the task!

Thank you, Daniel Swift

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable But Enigmatic, November 25, 2010

By 

BRIAN D. ONEILL (Morristown, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War (Hardcover)

If the measure of a good book is how much it makes you think after finishing it, Bomber County is a rousing success. It works best on the level of personal Odyssey: the author and his father travel from England to the Continent to discover as much as they can about the lost life and death of their grandfather and father, a Pathfinder Force Lancaster pilot shot down and killed with the rest of his crew off the Dutch Coast in the Summer of 1943. The author also immerses himself thoroughly in the aging veteran and bombing survivors' subculture of reunion and remembrance to try and capture the spirit of the time and understand better what his grandfather's life was like before he died. The author spends countless additional hours perusing personal and public records of RAF Bomber Command to mine additional material, and what the author finds--the written effects of RAF airmen long since dead and all but forgotten--is very moving. Finally, the book's closing pages "bring one back down to earth" with a grisly description of the pilot grandfather's death, gleaned from wartime reports on the condition of his body when it washed ashore on a Dutch beach. I won't "give the ending away" by describing what the author and his father discovered at the end of their journey, but the particular facts give one pause.

I think the book succeeds far less well in its discussion of "The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War." I say this not because I question the author's credentials and qualities as a literary critic, but because there is so very little genuinely good war poetry written by British wartime aircrew. This irks the author, who I suspect wanted to debunk the somewhat patronizing stance of those who declared in advance that the RAF and WWII British armed forces would never equal the English poetry that came out of the trenches of WWI. I think the author hoped to find some hidden poetical gems in his research, and by my lights he didn't, at least in the ranks of the RAF.

By way of compensation we are treated to discussion of related "bombing poetry" whose quality sometimes seems inversely related to the distance the poets were from the RAF night bombing campaign. By far the best and most relevant IMO is the author's survey of American Randall Jarrell's wartime poetry about the US Army Air Forces and the 8th Air Force in particular. Of course, Jarrell's brilliant and shockingly brief "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" occupies pride of place in this discussion, but his other "air force" poetry, of which I was ignorant, is also reviewed and well treated. I was likewise very intrigued to learn of John Ciardi's poems about the B-29 war in the Pacific, and frankly shocked to discover that he was a B-29 gunner before translating "Dante's Inferno" in later life. (Surely there is a connection there!)

I was less impressed about the relevance of Dylan Thomas's wartime poems (and rather disgusted by his narcissism and cowardice during the war) and the discussions of other "on the ground" poets, however good their works. Sorry, but it just felt off topic to me.

There's one poem the author mentions that I feel should have been given greater consideration: James Tate's "The Lost Pilot." Written by a man whose B-17 pilot father died before the son was born, it is a true apotheosis of loss, and perhaps the best verse ever penned about the air war in WWII.

I rather think the author would have been better served broadening the scope of his literary survey of the RAF Bomber Command aircrew experience by moving beyond poetry to autobiography, memoir and fiction. The Pitcher and the Well From the Papers of a New Zealand Airman (P.O.W. in Germ is a must-read work because the anonymous author writes with one foot in the grave. He was horribly burned when shot down, and died in a German Hospital as a POW. A Thousand Shall Fall: The True Story of a Canadian Bomber Pilot in World War Two by Murray Peden is, I think, the best memoir written by an RAF bomber pilot about the experience for flying "ops" in the ETO. Finally, there is Len Deighton's overlooked masterpiece, Bomber: Events Relating to the Last Flight of an R.A.F. Bomber over Germany on the Night of June 31, 1943 which by coincidence covers a fictional Bomber Command raid taking place the same month that author's grandfather was killed. Written with a certain 1970s cynicism, it still has the ring of truth to me.

My bottom line on "Bomber County." Buy it and read it, but be forewarned that Bomber Command had neither a Wilfred Owen nor a Homer to put its deadly work to verse. If you're looking for such a poet here, you'll be disappointed.

FWIW I've done a bit of what the author did myself, even including some poems where appropriate. My approach, however, was records, contemporary narrative, and recollection to get at the truth. See Half a Wing, Three Engines and a Prayer: B-17s over Germany

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A different look at a familier topic, September 7, 2011

By 

Mary Barnett-lewis "Why should I care?" (Madison, WI, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War (Paperback)

Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War by Daniel Swift

On the night of June 11/12 1943, the grandfather of the author disappeared while piloting a mission in a Lancaster bomber. Poetry, of/about/by bombers, is used as a literary frame work to the telling of how he and his father tracked down what really happend to his grandfather on his last night alive.

This is not military history as such, rather a far different, rather academic, work that rewards close reading followed by reading the poetry of the authors mentioned - sometimes in depth and sometimes in passing. There are good notes at the end but an index, even a poor one, would help the book tremendously. The discussions of TS Eliot, John Ciardi, Randal Jarrell, and, yes, J.E. Swift more than make up for it's failings.


It's a fascinating work that comes at a familier subject - the air war over Germany - from a very different perspective.

(I am not sure why the review system thinks I am my wife.)