First Light

"Yes, he’s terrific. He is not a combat hero, an ‘ace’ (someone who has shot down five enemy aircraft), though he was a good pilot. His skill is in taking the reader into the aircraft and giving them the experiences he had. It was very dangerous and the training period was quite lengthy. The RAF lost over 8,000 men during training for bombers alone. There was no support, which is why they had to develop their own defence systems. But some of them couldn’t cope. The RAF had a term for this – it was called ‘a lack of moral fibre’. If you were branded as having a lack of moral fibre you were basically branded a coward and taken away. That’s why the men developed terms such as ‘bought it’. I remember interviewing one airman who said to me: ‘When someone bought it we went off to the pub and toasted them. What else could we do?’"

"Geoff and I go back a long way. I have a strange, serendipitous connection to this book because when I was researching a wartime novel of my own, I went to interview a number of Battle of Britain pilots, and Geoff was one of them. We met in his local pub down in Cornwall, and while we were chatting over several pints of ale he happened to mention that he had written this book about 25 years earlier. He told me there was a chapter in it which was like a day in the life of a Battle of Britain pilot, and asked me if I would like to read it. When I got back home I wrote to him and asked if I could see the whole manuscript. So he sent me the one and only manuscript, which had been sitting in his drawer. I read it and I was blown away by it. I thought it was incredible. I rang him back, explained that I worked for Penguin Books and asked if he wanted me to show it to a few people. He said yes. So I gave it to Antony Beevor ’s editor who also loved it, and the manuscript got published. First Light went on to become the most successful book by a military writer in the first decade of the 21st century. It was very exciting. There was just the right amount of danger when he was training. You could kill yourself quite easily in an aircraft, but there was incredible glamour. The air wasn’t clogged up with light aircraft and traffic controllers and all the rest of it. You got into your tiger moth and off you went. Flying was still in its infancy in the late 1930s. It was terribly thrilling and exciting to suddenly see the world from the sky. Yes. And everything changes when you suddenly find yourself in the Battle of Britain. It was incredibly harrowing. I can’t even begin to tell you how difficult it was, physically and mentally, to fly three times a day in those sorts of conditions – knowing that any moment might be your last. He stayed on just a bit too long with 92 Squadron in his first stint, then he had another command later on. By the time he went to Malta in August 1942 he was completely spent. Everyone has a bank of courage and mental toughness, and once it is spent it is spent. Unless you have a really good long rest, you can’t get over it. You need to manage it, and the problem with Geoff was that those signs weren’t picked up on. He is still damaged by his experience, but he is great fun as well. He still loves his pints, and I see him from time to time and consider him a friend. The success of his book was obviously a boost for him. The Dam Busters is one of the most extraordinary air raids of all times. It was just astonishing, not least because of the incredible skill that was required. You have to remember that this was a hastily put together squadron. They were given about six weeks in which to train, but many of them turned up late. Their mission was to destroy the main dams in the Ruhr area of Germany. To do this they had to drop a four tonne rotating bomb on a sixpence, and watch it bounce across the water for four hundred yards and hit the edge of the dam. Then the bomb would sink some 30 feet and explode, and that would cause the dam to breach. That was the idea. You have to remember that these guys were used to operating at 18,000 feet, where quite frankly if they had got within a mile or two of the target they would have done pretty well. So to suddenly be flying at a hundred feet and to drop a bomb accurately from 60 feet is a very big ask. They were flying at night at one hundred foot, which is just unbelievably difficult. The only way you can navigate accurately is to occasionally go a little bit higher, take a fix and see where you are, then come down again. But that has all sorts of risks, because as soon as you go above a certain height you are in the realm of enemy radar. It is a particularly British trait to be down on our achievements. I think it is part post-Empire guilt, and part our characteristic that we like to belittle our achievements. We do it with sports stars as well, and it was the same with the war. In terms of the Dam Busters after the film, subsequent historians have been keen to point out that the raid didn’t really do very much. They say it was a moral boost for us but really a waste of time considering the dam was rebuilt in five months. But what no one has ever bothered to look at was why the Germans had to rebuild it in five months, and the effort that took in terms of time and diversion of resources. So I think some historians have been looking at it in completely the wrong way. And in fact, by May 1943 we didn’t really need a moral boost because we had just won in North Africa. Strategically it was massively important, because it caused the most enormous diversion of resources and expense. The repair of the dams cost, in today’s terms, something like £5.6bn ($9bn). Yes. The issue had limited impact in Britain – it was a good story, and everyone enjoyed it. But in Germany it was very important. The dams were hugely iconic structures there. They were very into the idea of the conquest of nature, and dams were seen as the German way of doing that. And these dams were absolutely enormous. They were known throughout Germany, so to have them destroyed is a bit like knocking down Tower Bridge or the Thames Barrier. So there was the psychological blow that somehow the enemy has got to us and destroyed us. For that reason alone, they had to rebuild them. But the main reason was that there was a water shortage in the summer of 1943, so if they didn’t rebuild them in time for the winter rain they would have a massive water shortage problem in 1944. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There was a huge rush to get the dams rebuilt, and to do that they had to divert something like 70,000 men. New railway lines, railway stations and barrack blocks had to be put in place in lightning quick time in order to rebuild them. The engineering effort was quite astonishing, and the problem with that is that the war was going on at the same time. In July we invaded Sicily in the Mediterranean and had counterattacks going on in the Eastern Front, so this couldn’t have come at a worse time [for the Germans]. To put it into perspective some 10,000 workers were diverted from the Atlantic war, and when the Allies landed on June 6th 1944 there wasn’t much of a war to fight. One of the reasons for that was because all the workers were in Germany rebuilding the dam."