Livro Em Inglês: Bomber - Len Deighton

Len Deighton is the London author famous for writing stacks of bestselling spy and war books, notably the Harry Palmer novels such as The Ipcress File and Funeral In Berlin, later filmed with Michael Caine playing the lead role. Deighton's books are fiction but are filled with such historical and technical detail that you feel immersed in the period and the subject whilst reading.

Just as you begin to think it is merely a technical recital, Deighton masterfully throws in a horrific line, for instance after a German plane crashes into the sea with the crew still on board, he explains how the liferaft inflates itself, and attached to the plane floats until over the weeks bit by bit the raft rots away and sinks, but "by then eels had eaten the three fliers." A clinical explanation of the damage done by exploding German cannon shells on an RAF Lancaster ends with a description of how a crew member leaves a foot-deep crater in the ground after being thrown out of the plane at 16,000 feet minus a parachute.

The bombing raid itself goes horribly wrong, though carried out with devastating effects, and you are left with a sense that there are no winners and no losers, there is just good and bad on both sides. I liked that because in all conflicts this is surely how it is.

Flight Lieutenant Sweet: On the surface he wants to be everyone's friend. Under it he is worming his way to a staff job at RAF High Command by sucking up to authority.

Group Captain Jarman: a veteran of the Great War, the Groupie runs his station as if it's still 1917. Women in the RAF? Not in my day old boy. My god we're here to kill Huns and kill Huns is what we're going to do. Grounds a sergeant pilot not only for percieved cowardice but more importantly because he refuses to play in the cricket team's next match.

Unteroffizer Christian Himmel: becomes the prime suspect in the theft of secret documents detailing Luftwaffe experiments on Jewish concentration camp inmates. He threatens to go right to the top with his findings until it's pointed out to him that Hermann Goering, Chief of the Luftwaffe, agreed with its conclusions.

Oberleutnant Bach: The kindly commander of the Luftwaffe radar station finds himself falling in love with the young girl who keeps his house for him. Freinds warn him of the dangers of getting in too deep but the greater danger arrives with the air raid he must plot against.