Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940-1945
Two of Patrick Bishop’s bestselling books, ‘Fighter Boys’ and ‘Bomber Boys’, are combined in one eBook edition.FIGHTER BOYS: In the summer of 1940, the future of Britain and the free world depended on the morale and skill of the young men of Fighter Command. This is their story.The Battle of Britain is one of the most crucial battles ever fought, and the victory of Fighter Command over the Luftwaffe has always been celebrated as a classic feat of arms. But, as Patrick Bishop shows in this superb history, it was also a triumph of the spirit in which the attitudes of the pilots themselves played a crucial part. Reaching beyond the myths to convey the fear and exhilaration of life on this most perilous of frontlines, Patrick Bishop offers an intimate and compelling account that is a soaring tribute to the exceptional young men of Fighter Command.BOMBER BOYS: Patrick Bishop looks at the lives and the extraordinary risks that the painfully young pilots of Bomber Command took during the air-offensive against Germany from 1940-1945.Like RAF pilots, the thousands of brave young men who joined Bomber Command took to the air to help Britain triumph in World War Two. But in the glow of victory, the fighter pilots were lauded for their efforts while the Bomber Boys faded in national memory. Crucial in the heat of combat, they were politically awkward afterwards. Yet with an average life expectancy shorter than that of soldiers on the Western front in WWI, these men faced death, injury and capture time and again to send bombs through the shrieking flak onto enemy territory. ‘Bomber Boys’ is a tribute to their strength, courage and heroism – filling in the historical blanks and immortalising their memory.
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PATRICK BISHOP
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This omnibus edition first published by HarperPress in 2012
Fighter Boys: First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2003
Copyright © Patrick Bishop 2003 Portrait © Max Arthur 2004
Bomber Boys: First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2007
Copyright © Patrick Bishop 2007 PS Section copyright © Louise Tucker 2007
PSTM is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
Patrick Bishop asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photograph courtesy of the trustees at The Imperial War Museum — CH7745
Maps of Cologne and Berlin © Copyright Royal Geographical Society
Maps of Bomber Command Stations, Targets in Europe, Germany, and the Ruhr Valley by John Gilkes
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Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007511037
Version: 2016-09-19
Fighter Boys
Saving Britain 1940
Patrick Bishop
To Kelly and Bill
This book is an attempt to answer a question that has fascinated me since I was a child. I grew up in Kent and London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Second World War was still a real presence. There were daily reminders of it in the weed-choked gaps between houses where German bombs had fallen and the muddy Anderson shelters that could still be found in suburban back gardens.
My first years were spent in the village of Charing. One of my earliest memories is of walking with my father, mother and sister through a ground mist of bluebells in Long Beech woods on the ridge above the village, close to the Pilgrim’s Way. Not long before the skies overhead had been a battleground. Occasionally my playmates and I found cartridge cases rusting underneath the ferns that we imagined had tumbled from the heavens during the fighting. Later I learned that a fighter pilot had crashed in flames into Long Beech after being shot down in the autumn of 1940.
We boys knew all about the Battle of Britain from small, square comic books, describing the great events of the war, that we bought eagerly as soon as they appeared in the village newsagent. They were our first history books. There, for the first time, we met heroes other than our fathers. It was the fighter pilots who hijacked our imaginations. We acted out their deeds in our games and dreamed about being them when we grew up. Their style and dash made them much more glamorous than the earthbound drudges of the infantry. Adults seemed to think so too. The Battle of Britain was mythologised before it was even over and those who took part in it were bathed in the glow of the legend.
At adolescence you shed your old heroes and get a new set. For a while it was slightly embarrassing to recall the passion that the silhouette of a Hurricane or the smudged snapshot of a young pilot once provoked. The grown-ups also seemed to have moved on. This was the Sixties. Men in uniform were now the targets of mockery.
Then, in the funny way that the recent past becomes suddenly almost as remote as the Dark Ages, the pilots slipped into history. There were plenty of books about the battles they fought and their crucial importance to the twentieth century. But they themselves grew obscure, blurred and monochrome like the photographs they took of each other, always smiling, as they hung about at dispersal, waiting to take off.
