Customer Reviews

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

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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

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

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.)

"What we are doing on the beach is looking for the memory of a corpse. But there is no sense of him here for there is no sense of debt." Daniel Swift, BOMBER COUNTY

Swift uses poetry as an organization tool, but he doesn't drown the text in poetry. But what's there is easy-to-understand, and it talks about flying, death, and war.

I credit Swift's poetic (concise) writing style as being the carrot that led me through his deeply researched and copious war details: dates; locales; WWII and WWI history; and information about flying, bombing, and the workings of aircraft I often say I learn history despite myself.) Readers interested in the Royal Air Force will not be disappointed.

I bought BOMBER COUNTY because I'd read a review about it in THE NEW YORK TIMES and couldn't believe a book featuring poetry was getting this kind of press. Intrigued, I opened the book, eager to read poetry I wouldn't have otherwise read. Well, I did read poetry, but not enough;I closed the book hungry for more. And that's okay, because I will now look for the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Randall Jarrell, Cecil Day-Lewis, and others.

"The cemeteries daydream of order." Daniel Swift, BOMBER COUNTY

I wish Swift every success with his unusual and interesting book.

Daniel Swift is a Professor of English at Skidmore College in upstate New York. He is British, and a graduate of Oxford. He is in his early 30s.

His book has two central goals - to discover the life of his paternal grandfather, a pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II, who died during a mission over Germany in 1943, and to review the quality of the poetry written during World War II. Mr. Swift mentions early on that WW2 is not thought of as having produced the quality of poetry that was written during WW1.

Often accompanied by his father, who lost his father when he was four, Mr. Swift, through frequent travels to areas associated with his grandfather's service in the RAF, and together with impressive, prodigious research, presents us with not only a biography of his grandfather, but also a fairly thorough, if concise, review of the war years and their effect on both England and Germany. He interweaves short biographies of key literary figures of the era - Stephen Spender, Randall Jarrell, TS Eliot, James Dickey, Virginia Woolf - with glimpses of the history both macro, as it would appear in contemporary and recent accounts of the period, and micro, as revealed in interviews Mr. Swift conducted with a number of people he met while researching his book. Particularly trenchant are interviews with people who served at the time the author's grandfather was in the RAF.

All in all, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in World War II, poetry written as responses and reflections to either observation or direct experience of war, and of the effect on British and German people on the "home front."

This book is all about toom stones with weak poetry engraved on them. The Wall Street Journal gave this book a good review. The poems quoted in that review is what caused me to purchase the book. Those poems were the only good ones. My wife hated it too.