Cassell Military Paperba
6 total works
'Derek Robinson does for the Royal Flying Corps what the War Poets did for frontline soldiers' - Daily Telegraph 'Beneath the insolent wit and ludicrous happenings is a novel essentially serious, whose full impact may be felt only in afterthought' - Sunday Times 'The descriptions of patrolling and aerial combat are superlatively well done...Stronger tastes will relish the whiff of battiness and brimstone.' - Times Literary Supplement Written by the Booker nominated author, Derek Robinson.
They had joined an organisation that advertised itself as 'the best flying club in the world'. Now the young pilots of 409 Squadron are flung into battle over Germany where their training, tactics and aircraft are all found sadly wanting. The spirit of the gentleman amateur flickers and dies in the harsh glare of searchlights over the Ruhr. We see the reality of war: chaos, cock-up and comradeship in equal measure. Derek Robinson reinforces his reputation as the best aviation fiction writer in the business with this tragi-comic story.
Derek Robinson's depiction of an RAF fighter squadron during the Battle for France and the Battle of Britain won critical acclaim but upset the Daily Telegraph-reading public. His pilots were real human beings, far from convinced of the wisdom of their military leaders or that of Churchill, for that matter. The likelihood of being burned to death in a Hurricane concentrated their minds on other things. Some turned to drink. Some turned on their own in order to survive. Others, most notably the brilliantly drawn anti-hero Flight Lieutenant 'Moggy' Cattermaul, scored a succession of aerial victories even if his behaviour on the ground was utterly unforgivable. A vivid and unforgettable portrait of young men at war: real men, not the two-dimensional stiff-upper-lip heroes of legend.
World War One pilots were the knights of the sky, and the press and public idolised them as gallant young heroes.
At just twenty-three, Major Stanley Woolley is the old man and commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron. He abhors any notion of chivalry in the clouds and is determined to obliterate the decent, gentlemanly outlook of his young, public school-educated pilots - for their own good.
But as the war goes on he is forced to throw greener and greener pilots into the meat grinder. Goshawk Squadron finds its gallows humour and black camaraderie no defence against a Spandau bullet to the back of the head.
At just twenty-three, Major Stanley Woolley is the old man and commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron. He abhors any notion of chivalry in the clouds and is determined to obliterate the decent, gentlemanly outlook of his young, public school-educated pilots - for their own good.
But as the war goes on he is forced to throw greener and greener pilots into the meat grinder. Goshawk Squadron finds its gallows humour and black camaraderie no defence against a Spandau bullet to the back of the head.
Set in North Africa in 1942. Striking hard and escaping fast, Fanny Barton's squadron play Russian roulette at 300 miles an hour, flying their clapped-out Tomahawks on forays. On the ground, the men of Captain Lampard's SAS patrol spy on German aircraft.
Derek Robinson's taut, witty and totally unsentimental portraits of combat have established him as one of our most highly regarded war novelists. In this, his longest and most ambitious book to date, he sets himself a new challenge: to tell the story of a small pioneer community in deepest Kentucky across a century from its founding in the 1820s, through the Civil War to the dawn of the modern age. Following several generations of two unreconcilable families, the Hudds and the Killicks, Robinson creates a gallery of unforgettable characters and delivers a powerful and wholly persuasive account of the transition from slavery to relative freedom for the former slaves of each clan. It is a bravura performance from a great modern storyteller.