Cassell Military Paperba
2 total works
On the night of 30-31 March 1944, R.A.F. Bomber Command took off on what should have been a routine "maximum effort" raid an Nuremberg. It turned into a major disaster, with Bomber Command suffering its heaviest loss of the war: of the 779 bombers taking part 96 were missing and, due to adverse weather conditions, Nuremberg was only lightly damaged. Martin Middlebrook's book is a detailed re-enactment of that operation, based on extensive research in English and German archives and interviews and correspondence with many of the senior officers who planned the raid, some 380 R.A.F. and Luftwaffe aircrew who took part and German civilians in the areas that were bombed. The result is a meticulous and dramatic account of a turning point in the bomber was as well as a moving record of the courage and sacrifice of the bomber crew. This revised edition contains an additional chapter in which the author comments on the dramatic suggestion, made since the original book was published, that the identity of Nuremberg as the target and details of the route to be used were deliberately disclosed to the Germans by British Intelligence as part of a more important intelligence operation.
An assured supply of armaments, petrol and foodstuffs from the US was vital to the British war effort, especially in the early days of the Second World War. The route across the north Atlantic, treacherous enough in itself, was made infinitely more so by German U-boats prowling in their wolf packs, ready for the quick kill. Merchant ships, slow and defenceless, were gathered in great convoys and shepherded across the pond by their escort destroyers, frigates and corvettes, offering at least some protection against the unseen enemy. Martin Middlebrook's account of two such convoys encompasses all the danger, drama and sheer awfulness of life - and death - at sea in the Battle of the Atlantic.