Flying into Hell: The Bomber Command Offensive As Seen Through the Experiences of Twenty Crews

by Mel Rolfe (Author)

• Used

  Illustrated
  2001

  $3.51

  Bringing real-life stories of bomber command at war, the author offers 20 dramatic stories of these brave men. Stories include a former rear gunner who, on returning to a French village, three years after bailing out from a blazing Lancaster bomber, was shown the site of his supposed grave. He had been so badly burned a French doctor had left him alone in a graveyard to die. He met again the brave people who had looked after him before he was well enough to join a group walking to freedom across the Pyrenees. Other stories include a bomber that came down so low over the sea to escape ack-ack guns that it struck the water, and managed to claw its way back up into the sky; the Lancaster pilot who wore Hermann Goering's Iron Cross around his neck as a lucky charm; a gunner incarcerated in Buchenwald; and a flight engineer who lost his fingers to frostbite after the bomber's rear door was blown open. Many of these stories demonstrate the amazing resilience of the human spirit and the unwavering courage of the young men who helped bomb the enemy into submission. A journalist by profession, the author has conducted his interviews and prepared the stories in such a way as to take the reader into the events as they happened.