The Bomber Command War Diaries

By Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt

Book Overview

Bomber Command's campaign started on the very first day of the Second World War and ended within a few hours of the final victory in Europe five and a half years later. It was an attempt to win the war in Europe by strategic bombing on such an enormous scale that historians have only recently begun to piece together the finer details of the individual raids.

There have been many books about Bomber Command, but Martin Middlebrook, the aviation historian, and his research colleague, Chris Everitt, were the first to compile a complete review of all the raids and the background stories to this fascinating campaign. They undertook the gargantuan task not only of documenting every Bomber Command operation but also of obtaining information from local archives in Germany, Italy and the occupied countries, on the effects of the raids. Little of this material had been published previously, and never before had the two sides of Bomber Command's war been brought together in this way.

The Bomber Command War Diaries has become the standard basic work of reference on this extraordinary campaign. This edition includes retrospective observations and a new appendix.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1783463600
• ISBN13: 9781783463602
• Release Date: December 2014
• Publisher: Pen and Sword Aviation
• Length: 808 Pages
• Weight: 2.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.4" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A must for reference or just a good read if you're inclined.

Having lived in Lincolnshire and experienced some of those derelict bommber bases along with a distance relative who perished as a Lancaster tail gunner, I had to know more! This book is an excellent reference manual taking the reader from the amateur beginnings of Bomber Barons ideals with the leaflet raids to the remorseless destruction of targets such as Dresden towards the end of the RAF Bomber Campaign in Europe. The book is split into 21 phases of the campaign based around either technical or strategic developments. Most raids are identified individually giving numbers despatched, losses and brief results/summaries. The introductions to the phases give good summary briefs of that particular stage of the campaign, be it Yalta or Window.An interesting spin off from this book was with my Dutch father in law who was a 'guest' worker in Kassel on the night of 22/23 Oct '43. According to the family it was apparently the only time he had talked about his experiences when he discussed this raid in the book with me. Not a pleasant experience, he lost most of his friends on that night.Otherwise this book is a definite requirement for the amateur historian or just the plain old hobbyist.