Customer Reviews

Bomber

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Deighton is at his best here in a subtle blend of fact and fiction that charts the lives (and in many cases, the deaths) of British and German characters in the air and on the ground. The novel spans a 24 hour period in 1943, as the Allied aerial bombing campaign was reaching its height and the outcome of World War 2 hung in the balance

The book can be read and re-read on many levels. It is a first rate thriller, and the reader's inevitable prejudices are soon set aside as the terrible cost to mind and body escalates. As an accessible documentary of the campaign, Deighton is unflinchingly accurate in blending fact with the necessary mechanics of characterisation. The book also serves as one of the most effectively subversive and persuasive anti-war essays of all time - if not the finest

This is a complex read, with dozens of characters and quite dense technical detail in parts. This, however, inspires concentration and repeated re-reading which constantly reveals new layers and depth of meaning. Deighton has never surpassed himself

If the main text is chillingly effective, then the Epilogue is a heart stopper. Deighton brings the story up to date (at the time of writing) and the fates of those who survived 1943 are vividly captured in the most evocative and sparing writing style of all.

Now, those who flew the bombers and those who fought and loved them are mostly gone, with none of the survivors under 75. Soon this book and a very few others will serve as an epitaph to a time when Europe was a battlegound where everyone, of all ages and races, civilian and miltary, was plunged into a lottery of life and death.

Though the title implies that this is the story of a single bomber crew over Germany in 1943, "Bomber" goes farther - much farther, only starting with the crew of the heavy bomber "Joe for King". Deighton proceeds to cover the families of the crew, other crew members and their superiors before cutting across the channel to the enemy - night-fighter pilots, their controllers in German air defense, various suspicious characters from across the spectrum of Germany's military - from "respectable" Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht personnel to shadowy types from the "Abwehr" and the SS. We also meet the civilian residents of Altgarten, a Ruhr-area town nobody would think of bombing, but which manages to get plastered all the same. It's mid-summer 1943, when "Joe for King" is sent into the Ruhr as part of a massive night-time raid against the industrial centers of Krefeld. Lacking night-vision goggles, RAF pilots drop their bombs on targets marked by flares left by directing aircraft - in this case, specially equipped Mosquitoe night-fighters. When the marking aircraft for the Krefeld raid is shot down too early, its flares are released over Altgarten. This error is compounded by inherent flaws in RAF tactics (like targeting bombs in the center of cities, where bombs are more likely to hit civilian homes than factories and military installations), and the town becomes the unintended target for the massive strike. "Bomber" is to RAF's wartime bomber command what "Traffic" is to the DEA - a story of massive scale borne by wide cast if characters that never stops growing. Deighton doesn't let something meaningless as nationality get in the way of determining who is good or evil (the Germans get the bombs here, but Nazi genocide also gets prominent mention, with plenty of nasty Waffen SS to remind us why people were fighting). On the British side, we see officers acting less like gentlemen than soldiers. Political correctness is the rule (this is the country that gave us "1984"; "Joe for King"'s commander is suspected of incipient Bolshevism - it's very name hints at Stalin). Those who won't fall in line risk being labeled as LMF (Lacking Moral Fiber) - officially branded as cowards. Though books with such a command of detail normally favor the efforts of those they depict, Deighton is uniformly negative on the subject, a tone reinforced by his many subplots. Lambert, "Joe for King's" rebel pilot, plays the best cricket in Bomber Command - leading his odious superior to compel his participation in an upcoming tournament on pain of getting LMF'd. (Worse - the commander puts pressure on Mrs. Lambert after her husband has departed for the big raid). The bombers fly from Warley Fen, a once verdant field seized from its original owners who now stare at the airfield, mourning for what they know they will never have again. In Germany, ADF is managed by August Bach, an aged warrior preparing to marry his young son's nanny, not knowing how her youthful looks have made her the target of vicious rumors through Altgarten. The pilots of a night-fighter squadron (nichtjagdeschwader), preparing for a feared RAF attack on the Ruhr, are thrown into turmoil when Abwehr and Gestapo appear in search of a stolen classifed memo. The memo, it turns out, details hypothermia experiments on concentration camp prisoners (this may be same memo mentioned early in Robert Harriss' superb "Fatherland"). The corrupt assistant to Altgarten's Burgomeister arranges for the downgrading of the town's remaining Jews (from 1/3rd to 2/3rd "Jewishness" - though these jews are even more likely to face deportation and certain death, they will have greater freedom to marry other jews). Altgarten itself is flooded with profiteers funneling goods looted from conquered parts of Russia and the Netherlands. It seems that war is the only thing keeping the world safe because it occupies all the amoral typed who have to fight it. The only morally just adults are the TENO - the civil safety personnel who dig people out of bombed buildings. Because they are stationed in Altgarten, they get the biggest break: when the raid comes, they have the shortest commute. With so much going on, you just know you're bound to miss something. This is the sort of book that speed-readers hate. You'll probably lose count of all the characters that Deighton throws at you, though this doesn't hurt the plot as much as make the book one you'll want to re-read. Be warned - once you pick up bomber, you'll probably be spoiled for any other novel on the war in the skies over Europe.

The best fictional account of the "Other Side's" (German) view of being the "attacked". Mr. Deighton obviously has done his homework in showing how one massive,confused attack on a German town in the Summer of 1943 devastates everyone involved from the British RAF planners and pilots, politicians, and even more the German civilian home front, not to mention just about everyone else on the German side,from the SS,Luftwaffe, to the totally innocent on the ground. When the air raid alarms go off in the ficticious German town to the inevitable,terrifying end, mistakes and all, you know you're reading from a master. The ending is as terrible as you can imagine...

This book is brilliantly constructed account of the 24 hours leading up to one of the maximum effort raids on Germany. Large cast of well portrayed character's recounts the incredible courage of the airmen of both sides and the appalling results on the ground.

Only one in three Bomber Command aircrew survived WWII and over 50,000 perished bringing the German war machine to it's knees. There has never been a battle like it. Fought in the middle of the night for 4 years with the prospect of a horrific death ever present night after night.

Imagine going "over the top" in WWI and surviving it, then being asked to do it again the next day. And the next.

Not only that but after the war being branded as murderer's by the very people whose lives you were protecting. The post war government quickly distanced themselves from what Bomber Command achieved, and no gratitude was ever publicly forthcoming for these boys sacrifice.

To this day it still beggars belief.

It's a pity this book has been relegated to the status of 'special order'. As an account of a single Lancaster night raid, it's without peer in portraying the lives of people enduring the horrors of war in any age. Deighton's skill at depicting characters has few matches, and the scope of this book, set in both Germany and England [as well as the skies above both] only enhances his writing abilities. Following the lives of bomber and night fighter crews as well as those living under bombardment, he shows how meaningless war is to the most hawkish adherents. It's not possible to read this book without being moved by how well Deighton sees into the minds and hearts of his characters. None of them are false or overdrawn.

'Strategic' bombing was implemented to maintain pressure on the Nazis in the hope of forcing sufficient discontent among the population. John Dos Passos once wrote on the futility of using 'terror' bombing to bring surrender of a people whose loved ones were killed and their homes destroyed. Bomber shows how barren this strategy truly was. It didn't work when London was blitzed. It certainly failed when even target cities were missed completely due to unforeseen circumstances. Deighton takes us step by step from the preparation of the aircraft and the defenses countering it through the raid and its aftermath. His portrayal of the 'military mind' is disconcerting when we reflect that the same attitudes prevail with little or no evidence of improvement. This book should be brought back on the active list and read by anyone seeing armed conflict as a mechanism of policy.

In this meticulously researched and finely-wrought novel, author Len Deighton interweaves the stories of a large cast of characters, German and British, in the hours leading up to a night bomber attack on a fictional Germany city. Due to crew error, a small German town is accidentally bombed by part of the bomber force. The story revolves around the men who fly the heavy British bombers, the men on the ground in Germany who must deal with the carnage of the bombs, and the German airmen and radar men who try to stop the bombers short of their tragic attack. Deighton writes that he read over 200 books to prepare for this novel. He also interviewed many British and German veterans and civilians and flew in most of the planes described in the book. The result is a book that favors neither side but instead focuses on the individual humanity of the characters, with all their strengths and weaknesses. Thousands upon thousands of warriors and civilians on both sides died horrible deaths and in a war that was, without a doubt, hell on earth. Though there is no glory in war, the book is filled with individual acts of selflessness and heroism that elevate the participants above the slaughter. Their heroism is not without great price, though, from the fireman battling the blazes to the British pilot who fights to bring his plane home only to suffer a breakdown, and the German pilot who is being hunted down for disagreeing with Nazi policy. I highly recommend this book. It is a must-read especially for those who desire to learn more about the air war over Germany.

This is a superbly plotted panel book in which every story ends with some sort of twist or irony. I write only to correct one error made by an earlier reviewer. Lambert's plane is NOT 'Joe for King', but 'the Creaking Door'. The CO is so out of touch that he mistakes the planes, thereby indirectly saving Lambert's life, much to his young wife's relief. (The casualty rates were horrific for bomber crews.)

It is somewhat amusing that the reviewer made the same mistake.

To my mind, the two best air war novels ever written are THE LAST TALLYHO by Richard Newhafer and Len Deighton's BOMBER. Newhafer's chronicle of USN Hellcat pilots at war benefitted from the fact that Newhafer flew F6Fs in WWII and knew his subject intimately. Len Deighton, on the other hand, had no experience of Bomber Command ops and had to do endless research to create what is an authentic and tremendously gripping portrait of a fictional RAF raid on a German town in 1943. That's why I give the tip of the hat to BOMBER.

Back in 1970, when I first read BOMBER, I finally realized what was meant by the phrase "compulsive page turner." I simply couldn't put the book down. Piece by intricate piece, Deighton created a spellbinding story of a bombing mission gone terribly wrong. That story was populated by living, breathing, sometimes flawed human beings English and German alike. On top of that, he got all the technical bits spot on! Nothing ticks me off more than when an author, writing an air war novel, commits a boner concerning aircraft, weapons, tactics, etc. Time after time in BOMBER, Deighton got it right.

Other reviewers have detailed the plot of BOMBER. Ostensibly, it is the story of a Bomber Command raid focusing on the crew of a Lancaster named 'The Creaking Door.' Yet, BOMBER is much more. It can be read on many levels. There are so many fascinating elements at work in the book such as the leisurely way Deighton develops the plot, the matter-of-fact manner in which he presents plot developments, the sympathetic portrayal of the British and German characters, the fashion in which 'minor' actions produce major consequences and so on.

To my mind, BOMBER is Deighton's masterpiece. None of his other novels were as gripping as BOMBER; likewise his non-fiction work. Whether you vew it as a war novel or an anti-war novel, it's just one damn fine read!

Len Deighton claims, in the Acknowledgements, to have read over two-hundred books in research for this novel, including one Karl Otto Hoffman's three volume history of the development of German Radar from 1933-1945, and, after finishing this book, one can well believe it. Not one tick of a Lancaster's variometer is left undescribed, nor is one speck of phosphorous burning through flesh from an incendiary bomb, nor is one pipe in a small German town's water system and nor are any of the truly horrific ways in which one can become dismembered, have one's flesh liquefied, be mauled, suddenly frozen, buried alive, eviscerated etc. in an incendiary bomb raid. - All are duly explored and fully depicted herein. - The book bombards, so to speak, the reader's sensorium with detail upon detail.

Some of this, for me, was very striking - especially the aeronautical details. My father was (and is) a pilot and an aeronautical engineer. And while never having flown in a military aircraft myself, my father was on some of the design teams for more advanced military aircraft still in use by the RAF (like the "jump jet"), and I went up with my father almost every weekend in our small prop-propelled aeroplane. I remember the altimeter, the mixture control, the stall light, the variometer (which tells one the speed at which one is ascending or descending), the smell of aviation fuel etc. ---They don't seem to have had horizontal stabilisers back then though, which for me, as a lad, when my Dad let me take control, was always the most fascinating instrument. It's VERY difficult to fly perfectly aligned with the horizon (nor is it necessary, basically an aeroplane flies in a rough sine wave according to the pockets of air it crosses), but it's rather a fun game for a seven year old to see how close he can get to perfection and how long he can maintain it. -Ahem, not very long at all. - But why am I mentioning all this technical rubbish? Because, again, the book is chock-full of it, and it's hard for me to imagine anyone except boffins like myself taking much of an interest in it. But there it is, even unto the ending of the book, where you are hanging on the edge of your seat as the battered planes land and wondering whether these chaps you feel you've come to know are going to cop it or come in safely or what, whilst ailerons, flaps and rudder control are still being explained in the greatest detail.

Basically, the structure of the book is that of a thriller, tightly wound. One knows what is going to transpire, so the "catch" of the book, as it were, is the wait, amongst Germans, Brits and readers, to see, exactly, very exactly, how all this carnage and mayhem unfold. Herein lies my slight reservation about the book. You will be, by turns, excited, terrified, and exhausted in the reading of it. - Also, if you don't skip these technical parts, which constitute about half of the book, you will be informed as to all manner of things. - But, stylistically, this has a jarring effect. Leighton seems to want to cram something from each of those 200+ books he has read into the narrative, so that there is this constant switching and shunting between technical manual and narrative, from page to page, paragraph to paragraph and, more often than not, within a paragraph. This aspect, for me, detracted from the experience of the reading.

I think Bomber is probably the best novelistic account a highly intelligent, technically savvy and curious reader could possibly find about British night-bombing in WWII. But the details put a drag on the narrative that, to belabour a metaphor, sends the tale that's being told here into a stall that's hard to pull out of at several points.

To conclude, it's more difficult to pull a narrative out of a stall than it is an aeroplane. And, really, it shouldn't be required of the reader. On the other hand, for readers who enjoy such challenges, don't hesitate to lower the flaps, gun the throttle and take off into the reading of this fascinating book.

Anthony Burgess includes this novel as one of his 99 best English novels written since 1930 and is absolutely correct to do so.

It is the story a RAF Bomber Squadron and their German opposition over a 24 hour period. From the planning of a 700 plane attack on Germany until they land again back at their squadrons.

It makes for a very harrowing read and it in no way glorifies war. It accentuates the exceptional bravery of those involved but it lays out for all to see the utter waste that war is.

I didn't realise how young the pilots in WW2 were, you had 23 year olds captaining Lancaster Bombers with 18 year old crewmen and 21 year old Germans trying to shoot them down. Thousands of these young men died. When they got hit by a canon round, they didn't just fall down dead with a neat little hole in them, they vaporised, suffered horrendous burns, all terrible stuff.

It is a great read and as it was first published in 1970, I wondered why it had not had the acclaim that other anti-war novels have garnered. My theory is that Deighton was primarily known for his spy thrillers at the time. It deserves to be a very famous book.

It is a wonderful book, without the humour and cynicism of "Catch 22" but the message is the same.