Dubble Deighton

In keeping with my recent fad for aerial adventure, here's two more that have been on my reading list:

Title: Bomber
Author: Len Deighton
Publisher: HarperCollins

Absolutely blown away by this book, ranks right up there with some of the great military fiction, like James Jones's Thin Red Line, Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five or Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn.

Bomber follows a single RAF night bombing raid over Germany from a number of perspectives: Lancaster bomber pilot Sam Lambert, German night fighter pilot Victor Lowenherz, radar station commander August Bach, and the inhabitants of the fictitious town of Altgarten.

The build-up to the raid is excruciatingly tense and slow-paced, as the participants go through their little pre-flight rituals, squabble or brown-nose with comrades and commanders, or make unrealistic plans for their futures. I'll admit the first third of the book can be a bit frustrating, as you're introduced to yet another set of characters who stumble into the story, wishing they'd DAMN WELL GET ON WITH IT. Which is the beauty of this section I suppose: that's precisely what all the bomber crews would be thinking.

The only part that still doesn't work for me in this part is the constant reminders and descriptions of the weather patterns and cloud formations. If this is intended to be ominous, it doesn't quite work, leaving me a little bit lost amid all the stratocumulous and cirrus nimbus.

The bombing raid itself, by contrast, is absolutely riveting.

Once the bombers take off, pretty much everything goes straight to hell more or less immediately. Planes ram into flocks of birds and crash. Pathfinders are shot down or mark the wrong targets. Fire hoses run out of water. Rescuers are killed by unexploded bombs.

The two contrasting themes are the mechanization of war and the extent to which soldiers and airmen become mere tools on the one hand, and the all-too-human jealousy, infighting and office politics that plagues everything that happens outside of the combat zone.

There's a wealth of technical detail here, but it's to Deighton's credit that this never (apart from the cloud formations) overwhelms the story. The sometimes arch observations on the nature of war, particularly from Lancaster pilot Lambert--the eagerness of the young to destroy, the speed with which war reduces them to automata, the ultimate futility of bravery in a war where individual contribution counts for nothing--really hit home hard by the end of the book.

Title: Fighter
Author: Len Deighton
Publisher: William Collins

Despite the parallel titles and identical author, Fighter is nothing like Bomber in the least.

Instead of a fictional account of a single action, this is a historical overview of the complete Battle of Britain in 1940, when Hitler and Goering's Luftwaffe tried to smash the RAF. Or did they? One of Deighton's major points throughout the book is that the Germans were extremely vague on what they were trying to accomplish--destroy the RAF, provide cover for a seaborne invasion or destroy Britain's capacity to resist one?

As with Bomber though, Deighton seems to take real pleasure in describing the technical aspects of war, the operation of radar and the Luftwaffe's guidance systems, the aerodynamic properties and characteristics of the Bf109 and Spitfire, pilot training schedules and aircraft production statistics. Some of this is fascinating--such as the fighter plane design and how it impacted both armament and flight performance (and therefore tactics). The Luftwaffe guidance systems, on the other hand, I just found a bit of a chore to read through, and still don't really understand.

As you might expect, there's a corresponding paucity of first-hand accounts. A couple of British pilots describe encounters, but that's about it. So frustratingly, there isn't much of a sense of what it was actually like for the people actually fighting this battle.

In the end, I'm a little perplexed by this book. It goes into such detail on the fighters and the tactics employed (especially on the German side--e.g. have fighters fly high above the bombers or down with them?) but even at the end of the book, I'm still not quite sure why they didn't wipe the floor with the RAF, other than due to lack of interest. The weather turned bad and Hitler, never especially interested in conquering Britain, turned towards Russia.

A bit depressing to realize that after all those deaths, one side just couldn't be bothered any more, but that does rather dovetail nicely with the message of Bomber.