THE LOST COMMAND

Bomber Command, R.A.F. The complete story of its long and bloody offensive 1939/45 in terms of the men who knew its terror and its triumph.

Fifty-five thousand dead, twenty thousand wounded, twelve thousand taken prisoner-that was the price paid by Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force at the conclusion of its offensive against German-held Europe in 1945. Did they die in vain?

That, ultimately, is the question which is examined by Alastair Revie in this book. It is a question which has been asked many times since the dust of so much destruction finally settled on a stricken Europe twenty-six years ago. Step by step the reader is led along the road of trial and error, set-back and defeat until the power of the Command was such as to aid massively a total victory.

The story of Bomber Command's effort in World War II begins with the force of somewhat obsolete aircraft which was deployed across the lush flat counties of Eastern England in the summer of 1939. It was manned by some of the finest airmen in the world-for the airmen of the pre-war Royal Air Force were a Corps d'elite, and it was the example they left as heritage that was to sustain so many of the young men who followed them in the years that came after.

The smell of oil-damp grass mingled with the slipstream freshness of those long September days as that summer which was to be the last so many of them would ever see touched the edge of Autumn. The politicians had made their noises: the next confusion would be that of war.

In that first winter of the war the two strongest air forces in the world faced each other in the careful formality of a deadly minuet. Already the Germans had developed the technique of co-operation with their ground forces which had gained for them the black accolade of a pestilence in the eyes of the civilised peoples of the world. 

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