Bomber

"I’ve chosen these five books for reasons that link to my own journey as a writer. I went to Cambridge to read English and I started writing for two publications. One was Granta , which was then a magazine, and the other one was Varsity , which was the university newspaper. If you were any good, they sent you off on assignments. One of my early assignments was to go down to Brighton to interview Len Deighton . I was a huge fan of Len Deighton as a thriller writer and spy novelist. I thought he was a brilliant read, and I thought his background research was impeccable. I admired the way he could make the language dance on the page. I was to meet him at his hotel and then, in the afternoon, go out to the Downs where they were shooting Oh! What a Lovely War . He was the most self-effacing, generous person. He gave me lots of time. He bought me lunch, which was a treat for a penniless student. On set, we inspected the trenches they had dug in the chalk downs on top of the cliffs. It was a memorable afternoon. I wrote the piece, and he liked it (or he was gracious enough to say that he liked it) and it went down well. I became even more of a Len Deighton fan. Bomber was published in 1970 and was relatively late in his oeuvre. It’s a big book. I have a fixation with various aspects of the Second World War and in my head, of all the guys who did genuinely heroic stuff, bomber crews were way up there, towards the top. They conducted this strange life of going out, often two or three times a week, and courting near-certain death. A typical tour was 30 trips, and it was unusual to finish that. They knew what was lying in wait for them. To survive against those odds, and to keep on doing it, to come back to eggs and bacon and clean sheets, must have been a weird life. “55,000 aircrew died during the war” I leapt on Bomber and I devoured it. It was a departure for Len Deighton, because it had taken a year and a half for him to research. That’s his account and I believe him. It’s painstaking in terms of its detail. To my mind, he smuggles a weight of narrative detail into dialogue, which can be a bit of a challenge. Sometimes it’s successful; sometimes it’s not. What’s incontestable is that this fictitious bombing raid is invented for the night of the 31st of June 1943, and the events are narrated from multiple points of view. It’s a hugely ambitious novel. It has lots of key characters. There’s the plane itself, a Lancaster. It’s called O for Orange, nicknamed the Creaking Door. It has a crew of seven. It’s under the command of a 25-year-old captain whose name is Sam Lambert. He’s married to the lovely Ruth. Once dusk falls and he’s in the dark over Germany, he’s going to be at the mercy of the Luftwaffe night fighters. He’s going to try to dodge, to fox, to fool the Luftwaffe Fighter Command station, which is on the Dutch coast. Welcome to the world of Oberleutnant Victor von Löwenherz in his Junkers 88. Each of the points of the narrative throws up subplots, in terms of wives, kids, mistresses, and emotional complications. The plane doesn’t take off until halfway through the book. It’s driven on (as your life would be, if you were part of that crew) by this remorseless determination to join the bomber stream; to evade, if possible, the attentions of the gunners and the night fighters; to plant your bombs as close as possible. In the dark, with the kind of rudimentary bomb aiming gear that they had, that was incredibly difficult to do, as well as bad news for the people underneath, many of whom were in villages short of the target. They were the ones who tended to get woken up at night by a very large bang. Len Deighton, at the controls of this book, did incredible justice to all of that. It’s quite a cold book, and it has an unhappy ending, as so many of these trips did, from the point of view of the Bomber Command men in the Lancasters, the men in Junkers 88s, and the people beneath the so-called bombing point. I applaud this book. It doesn’t have the warmth that many of his earlier books have, but it is an outstanding achievement. The key statistic is around an 8 percent chance of surviving 30 trips intact. You might come back wounded; much more likely, you would be dead or taken prisoner. It is a horrifying statistic to go to bed with at night. I think we are. And the real bitterness for the men, who took the risk of flying and dying or sometimes surviving, was what happened to them after the war. 55,000 aircrew died during the war. That’s a lot of men, a quantum illustration of the risks that they ran. Yet they never received the recognition that was awarded to the Navy, the Submariners, the Royal Marines, or the Combined Operations Headquarters staff in terms of the collective war effort. The men from Bomber Command were neglected. That was because they were led by a man called Arthur Harris, known as ‘Butch’ or ‘Bomber’ Harris. He was incredibly focused and effective. He was a hard man. He did his best to protect his men, but he was going to lay waste to German city after German city, and that produced footage towards the end of the war that, once the war was over, horrified large parts of the rest of the world. ‘Look what the Brits have done. Look what Bomber Command has done!’ It was partly because it was the only option. If you’re bombing at night, it’s bound to be imprecise. Americans bombed by day and had a different kind of bombsight, so they were much more accurate. Plus they had a screen of fighters, P-51 Mustangs. If you put yourself in the head of any member of a bomber crew surviving by the end of the war, you can share that sense of being abandoned, having risked your life night after night, year after year. That would have made anyone extremely bitter."