Category: Review

Lancaster by Leo McKinstry, 592pp
a long book which has enough space to get into everything to do with the Lancaster bomber, from its manufacture, to the heroics of the aircrew, to the still-controversial area bombing of German cities. Certainly Arthur Harris was determined to area bomb all German cities as thoroughly as he could manage, but at the time almost everybody agreed with him. It was only after Dresden that politicians started to distance themselves from this strategy and point the finger of blame at Harris.  Few books go into the detail of the disagreements between Harris and his superiors in the Air Ministry, but this one does.  Harris was clearly a difficult man and the bosses had great difficulty in getting him to do anything he didn’t want to do.    He refused to attack  point targets even after his force demonstrably had developed the capability to do so. He was an enthusiast for the Lancaster and repeatedly demanded that production of all other heavy bomber types be wound down.

Surprising facts: 1) While in 1939 the RAF bombers  had difficulty in bombing within 5 miles of the target, by 1944, using the best bombsights and electronic aids, they could achieve a degree of accuracy that would be thought not bad even in 2010.  It was quite good enough to demolish individual factories, bunkers and troop concentrations.   2) The Lancaster could carry a slightly greater bomb load than the USAAF’s huge B29, and with its single bomb bay could accommodate a much longer bomb. Hence it was briefly considered for use in dropping the atom bombs on Japan.  3) 10% of Lancaster crew fatalities occurred during training.

I was sufficiently impressed with this book to order the paperback for my library after reading the public library’s hardback.

B-17’s Over Berlin: Personal Stories from the 95th Bomb Group by Ian Hawkins (424pp)

Personal accounts of the men who served in the USAAF’s 95th Bomb Group, based in East Anglia, UK, during WW2. By skilful selection of personal accounts, Hawkins reveals what it was like to be several miles above Germany, freezing cold and being shot at, as well as how the air bases affected life in Norfolk and Suffolk, and how the men and planes were moved from the US to the UK. There are accounts from ground crews, and from men who were shot down and who evaded the Germans or were captured.  Particularly memorable, apart from the high loss rate on some bad missions, are the frequent losses from causes other than enemy action. Take-off crashes and mid-air collisions while forming up were a daily occurrence. One young man had both feet amputated because of frostbite, just because the electric heating of his flying boots failed at altitude.  Crew losses in the USAAF air war were in the tens of thousands. Many of these brave young men now lie in the American cemetery at Madingley, Cambridge.

Crews often fought gun battles with German fighter planes, and shot down many of them.

This is an excellent book which paints a remarkably complete picture of the 95th Bomb group operations.

I found that it whetted my appetite for a work describing the American air war in WW2 in strategic terms, and for comparisons with the British effort.  The B-17 was designed to fly in defensible formations, and had larger caliber guns than British bombers, more guns, and more gunners. American bombers sometimes returned with the floors covered in thousands of spent shell cases, while British bombers might not fire a single shot.  Despite this, the USAAF  bombers required fighter escort to make their missions survivable.  Lancaster pilots often struggled to pull their plane out of a high-speed dive, wheras no B-17 pilot in Hawkins’ book mentions this.  There are many accounts of all ten crew baling out of a stricken B-17, but few of all 7 crewmen bailing out of a Lancaster, where the narrow escape hatches were a cause of complaint.  The B-17 had an autopilot which was of great help during a bail-out.  Mainly because of its heavy armament, the B-17’s bomb load was no greater than that of the smaller and lighter two-engined DH Mosquito, and much less than the maximum load of a Lancaster.

The Dead Hand by David E Hoffman, Icon Books, 577pp, 2010.

The Dead Hand gives us the untold story of the cold war arms race and the efforts made to clear up the Soviet arsenal after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Its opening chapters relate the efforts made by Reagan and Gorbachev to negotiate away their nuclear arsenals. Ronald Reagan was vehemently anti-Communist but was shaken by a presentation in which officials showed him what would happen to the USA in the event of a nuclear attack.  Consequently he became determined to eliminate the threat of nuclear war, either by getting rid of the weapons or by constructing an impenetrable anti-missile shield, the SDI or “Star Wars” project.  Mikhail Gorbachev had similar ideals. Unfortunately, in the prevailing atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion, civil and military officials on both sides did not share their leaders’ ambitions. Reagan, encouraged by his officials, clung to his dream of SDI (a project which was, and remains, entirely imaginary) and this is why Reagan and Gorbachev came within a whisper of abolishing strategic nuclear weapons but in the end accomplished little.  With the paranoia, the false alerts and the brinkmanship, it seems largely a matter of luck that we’re all still alive today.  The USA and Russia even now have enough nuclear weapons targeted on each other to destroy everybody several times over.

The Soviet military-industrial complex was nothing like as technically advanced as American officials believed.  The Soviets had a Star Wars program to make space-borne lasers, but it never worked. What they were able to do, was to keep making missiles and warheads and weapon systems in an unstoppable stream. There was, literally, no way of scaling back the production, and they had so many missiles it didn’t even occur to them to use cheap dummies instead of fully functional missiles for launch training.

The Soviet “Doomsday machine” was real. It was called “Dead Hand” and was a semi-automatic system for enabling the launch crews to launch their missiles should the central command be destroyed.

In the 1970’s the Soviets and the USA renounced chemical and biological weapons and agreed to dispose of all stocks, which the USA duly did. The paranoid Soviets didn’t believe this, and during the 1980’s and the 1990’s, they continued a massive, totally secret, and illegal CBW program, employing thousands of people and costing billions of roubles.

With the fall of Gorbachev and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the USA was faced with a new headache. The Soviet empire was disintegrating, but known to be armed to the teeth with huge quantities of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that were not secured and could fall into the hands of who knew what rogue state or terrorist group.  The production of nuclear weapons stopped only when the USSR collapsed and the money stopped, but the CBW programs were even more difficult to stop, and were still running even after Russian president Boris Yeltsin tried to have them cancelled.

The Iranians, North Koreans and others made efforts to acquire experts and weapons technology from the collapsed USSR, but a program headed by American visionaries was largely successful, at the cost of a few billion dollars, in removing stockpiles to safety, providing money for desperate Russian experts, and encouraging the suspicious Russians to improve their terrifyingly rudimentary storage procedures.

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
Hardcover, paperback, Kindle and audiobook formats
I listened to this book in the unabridged audiobook format, which was well read and produced.
This is the second of the ‘Book of Dust’ series, which is a sequel to the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. The first ‘Book of Dust’ – ‘La Belle Sauvage’ – features Lyra Silvertongue, the principal character of all the books, as a baby.
In ‘The Secret Commonwealth’ Lyra is twenty years old, and a student at Oxford. She has a difficult relationship with her daemon, Pantalaimon. Pantalaimon witnesses the murder of a scholar at a riverside, which leads to the duo obtaining the dead man’s rucksack and notebooks. This leads to Lyra and friends starting to investigate a complex mystery involving roses, rose-oil, a fanatical far eastern sect, and Dust. The Magisterium, a repressive religious organisation, also features in the book, appearing remarkably resilient considering the events in the previous trilogy. Pan leaves Lyra and goes off on a quest of his own (the ability of some humans and daemons to separate is an important part of the story). The story develops into an eastward quest with Lyra and Pan separately pursued by Marcel Delamare, an official in the Magisterium, and Olivier Bonneville, son of a man who featured in ‘La Belle Sauvage’.
I found the story gripping, and liked it more that ‘La Belle Sauvage’ which I thought was a somewhat unnecessary book. The numerous exotic settings are well realised, and the dramatic turns of the plot hold one’s attention. Readers may be conscious of echoes of contemporary trends in our own world. There are no principal characters under the age of twenty, so I am not sure how well TSC will be received by readers expecting a book for young people. With its violent events and philosophical references, it seems aimed more at an adult audience. ‘TSC’ is a long book, over 700 pages, but the story is not resolved in it. Unlike the previous volume, it ends on a cliff-hanger.
Some reference is made to events in ‘His Dark Materials’ and ‘La Belle Sauvage’ but it is not essential to be overly familiar with either.

The Many Not the Few – the stolen history of the Battle of Britain by Richard North. (This is the first of what I hope will become an occasional series of book reviews)

Richard North is a defence analyst and blogger. In this book he seeks to dismantle the myth that ‘The Few’ – the small group of fighter pilots who fought in the ‘Battle of Britain’ – saved Britain from invasion in 1940. North paints a much wider picture.

Hitler’s war aim was to force Britain out of the war rather than to defeat Britain, and to achieve this he had to force Britain to come to terms. To do this, he mounted a three-fold pressure. While diplomatic approaches seeking a settlement were made in secret, Hitler attempted a blockade, threatened an invasion, and sought to undermine the morale of the British population. The blockade consisted of attacking shipping bringing supplies to British shores, and attacking our ports from the air. Preparations were made for an invasion, a threat which also had the useful result of keeping within Britain forces that could have been used elsewhere for fighting in the Mediterranean or protecting convoys. Finally, air attacks were meant, among other things, to undermine the will of the British people to resist. If the people had not been determined to resist, Churchill would have been forced to come to terms, just as various countries on the Continent had done.

Resistance to Hitler’s aims at sea was just as important as the battle in the air, and so was the determination of the people to resist bombing attack. North points out the importance of wartime propoganda: claims of Luftwaffe losses were greatly exaggerated, compounded by the comparison of Fighter Command losses with total German fighter and bomber losses. In fact, if one counts the total losses in all air commands on both sides, British and German aircraft losses were almost equal. The existence of an invasion threat was useful to Churchill, who could point to it to stiffen the resistance of the British people.

In actuality, the invasion threat was just that, a threat. The Germans gathered large numbers of barges in visible preparation for an invasion, but unlike the Allies in 1944 they did not possess any of the specialist ships and landing craft required for an opposed beach landing, in which material had to be unloaded at speed. German generals and admirals knew this and kept pointing it out to Hitler. Even when it became clear that an invasion was not practical, the Germans kept up the pretence of preparation to maintain the pressure on Britain.

On the whole, the British Government did a good job of resisting the Germans, though there were significant lapses. Even though fighter pilots were a scarce resource, no official efforts were made to rescue them should they have to bale out over the Channel, and many were drowned. Air-sea rescue was only set up much later. The Germans on the other hand had an efficient seaplane rescue service. The British rather unsportingly used to shoot these planes down.

Initially, little or no provision was made to aid people bombed out of their homes, and they were left to go from one office to another trying to get relief, being treated rather like cross-channel migrants. In a notorious incident hushed up at the time, a school acting as a relief centre for the bombed out, who should have been bussed to safety, suffered a direct hit from a bomb which killed a large but still unknown number of people. The provision of deep shelters was actively refused as a matter of policy, and people were forbidden from using the Underground stations as deep shelters. Only when people started breaking in, or buying platform tickets to gain access, was this policy reluctantly reversed. In various places, people used dank and facility-less tunnels as ready-made shelters. With a bit more incompetence in this area, a change in public mood could have lost us the war.

The question of war aims was another bone of contention. Those of a socialist bent wanted the Government to promise a workers’ utopia, wheras Churchill was determined that after the war things would remain the same as before. This thinking found its outlet in the myth of ‘The Few’ versus a ‘people’s war’.

This is a thought-provoking book and well worth reading.

Disenchanted by CL Raven, 222pp, paperback.

This is a short story collection from two Welsh sisters writing as CL Raven. This is a collection of traditional folk tales rewritten with a dark-fantasy feminist twist. The first story opens with ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess called Snow White. Who the hell calls their child that?’ – an opening line that prompted me to buy the book. The opening story ‘Long Live the Queen’ is told from the point of the wicked stepmother as she tries to get rid of that irritating goody-goody, Snow White.

The other nine stories are in a similar vein, and most have modern settings. The same characters, for instance Prince Charming and Snow White, appear in more than one tale, and I feel it would have been better if they hadn’t, as there is an impression of the same ideas being re-cycled. Mostly the tales are entertaining, in a bawdy kind of way and quite well constructed.  Occasionally, the bawdy humorous tone seemed overdone and getting too like fan fiction.

The book is quite well produced, with no obvious typos and each chapter is opened with a traditional-style illuminated letter, e.g. ‘O’.

Worth checking out if you like modern dark fantasy with a touch of humour.

You can find out more about CL Raven and their other books on their website clraven.wordpress.com