Bomber

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He outlived any of his crew, for from 16,000 feet the wireless operator falling at 120 mph (the terminal velocity for his weight) reached the ground ninety seconds later. Deighton does well in creating background biographies for all the major characters he introduces which provides insight into their emotions and reactions to the war, air combat preparations, and human relationships.

Although now, in the cool of the night, the aircraft was steadier than it had been in the heated turbulence of afternoon, the air was still full of surprises. Deighton describes people in love, people hating each other, people that are experts at what they do and people that are novices or just incompetent. While in New York City working as a magazine illustrator he began writing his first novel, ‘The Ipcress File’, which was published in 1962.

As for his writing, it's smooth as always, but the glibness he displays in his spy novels here becomes an unsettling detachment as he describes the dismemberment, disembowelment, and disintegration of characters with whom the reader has just spent the last several hundred pages.

Deighton obviously has done his homework in showing how one massive,confused attack on a German town in the Summer of 1943 devastates everyone involved from the British RAF planners and pilots, politicians, and even more the German civilian home front, not to mention just about everyone else on the German side,from the SS,Luftwaffe, to the totally innocent on the ground. Since this was published in 1971, word processors was not something anyone had, so maybe he is right.

The main characters are RAF pilot, Sergeant Sam Lambert, one of England’s best pilots, and German ace, Oberleutnant Baron Victor von Lowenherz.

Len Deighton brings to life in authentic detail the horror for all involved in the night bombing campaign of WWII.

He piles on details and specifications about the flight envelope of the Lancaster, the plotting techniques of German radar operators, the methods of Luftwaffe night fighters, and the physics of white phosphorous. Victor von Löwenherz, a German night fighter pilot who intercepts RAF bombe