Bomber (novel)

Bomber is a novel written by Len Deighton and published in the UK in 1970. It is the fictionalised account of the events of 31st June [sic], 1943 in which an RAF bombing raid on the Ruhr area of western Germany goes wrong. In each chapter, the plot is advanced by seeing the progress of the day through the eyes of protagonists.

Plot summary

Sam Lambert is an experienced RAF pilot based at an East Anglian bomber station. He has been flying missions over Germany since the start of the war and as he nears his tour's end, he is developing stressful exhaustion. But his crew revere him and believe he is the one factor that will ensure they survive. RAF Bomber Command is organising a large air raid on Krefeld tonight. We join the bomber crews at rest and in preparation for the ordeal. The men, their planes, weapons, responsibilities, attitudes, thoughts and fears are described to us in great detail with minute historical accuracy.

There are frequent references to weather conditions, meteorological phenomena and forecasts that add to the foreboding in the plot.

Meanwhile across the Channel in northwest Germany the small market town of Altgarten goes about its daily business, its residents and wartime guests aware of the war's progress but curiously untouched by it. They are even less aware of the horrors that will befall their town later.

We follow Oberleutnant August Bach returning from leave in Altgarten to his duties at the Freya radar installation on the remote Dutch coast looking out towards England. His job is to detect and track the Tommi Terrorfliegers on their night-time raids against the Fatherland then guiding by radio a Luftwaffe Nachtjagd (nightfighter) to intercept and attack.

Back in Altgarten the burgermeister finalises preparations for his own birthday banquet. It is to be held in a cosy restaurant located in the timber built, medieval town square. We are introduced to the Altgarten TENO engineers who regularly work heroically in the nearby Ruhr cities following air raids, and the local fire crew, adequate for a small country town but useless against what is to come.

The bombs are loaded into the Lancasters, the German radars are allowed to "warm up", the aircrews adjust their night vision and everyone sits and waits and waits. Superstitions, rites and rituals are respected as the combatants ready themselves. Meanwhile Altgarten's people continue with their day-to-day routines.

Eventually the raid gets under way. The British bomber stream forms up and navigates its dogleg course avoiding known flak concentrations and searchlight batteries. As the bombers are pinpointed by German nightfighters, we discover in the minutest detail how tiny pieces of shrapnel from an 88mm anti-aircraft shell can destroy one of 750 Lancasters each costing more than £42,000 at 1943 prices.

Despite the meticulous planning, things inevitably go wrong immediately. A Lancaster almost crashes on take-off. A Junkers fighter crashes into the sea after hitting birds over the IJsselmeer. Another is shot down by a friendly flak-ship. A pathfinder Mosquito is downed and its marker bombs explode south east of Altgarten. With little flak and clear bombing conditions Christmas Tree marker pyrotechnics are placed with unusual accuracy. Creepback ensures the entire town of 5,000 inhabitants is precision carpet bombed by a force designed to destroy a city and a firestorm results.

The author maintains a clinically distanced vantage point, understating and implying the horror of the character's situations. Even so, the protagonists' injuries and deaths are described in the same detail as the airmen's tactics. Each successive event is clinically dissected and analysed almost as though in slow-motion.

The book ends with an epilogue which gives details of the later lives of the major characters, some of whom, like Lambert and Bach, are purportedly still alive at the time of the book's appearance.

Viewpoints

• The crew of RAF Lancaster bomber, nicknamed "Creaking Door", particularly its pilot, Sgt Lambert
• August Bach, the commanding officer of a Luftwaffe radar station on the Dutch coast
• Oberleutnant Victor Löwenherz, an aristocratic Luftwaffe night fighter pilot and his fellow crew members
• Bach's housekeeper/mistress, Anna-Luisa, and his infant son, Hansl, at their home in Altgarten, a small German village close to the Dutch border
• Altgarten's burgomaster, fire chief, civil defence (TENO) engineers and residents

Trivia

• The novel, Bomber, is an early example of docudrama very thoroughly researched and a mine of detail even down to the 1943 price of a Lancaster bomber. Deighton himself claimed to have written more than half a million words in research notes.
• Bomber is probably one of the earliest printed works of fiction composed using a computer — an IBM 72IV with magnetic tape.
• The book's opening words: It was a bomber's sky: dry air, wind enough to clear the smoke, cloud broken enough to recognise a few stars have appeared in several quotation dictionaries.
• Kingsley Amis is said to have rated Bomber one of the ten best books of the 20th century.
• Anthony Burgess, in Ninety-nine Novels, cited it as one of the 99 best novels in English since 1939.
• The book was adapted into a radio drama by the BBC on February 18th 1995. The play was broadcast in several sections over the course of a single day, timed so that the events were broadcast at approximately the time they would really have occurred. As the raid was now taking place in February rather than June, the producer Jonathan Ruffle used timings from similar raids in February 1943 which meant the operation was accurately completed by midnight (when the BBC came off the air) rather than at about 0400 as in the book. It was very highly praised as a superior example of its genre. Tom Baker led the cast as the narrator.
• The day in question was supposed to be June 31, 1943. A disclaimer at the beginning of the novel states: "There was no June 31 in 1943 or in any other year."
• In 1979 Motörhead frontman, Lemmy, dedicated the band's 3rd album Bomber to Len Deighton, as it was his novel that had inspired the title-track.

Dramatisation

In 1995 the BBC's Radio 4 broadcast a "real time" dramatisation of Deighton's documentary novel Bomber, covering the novel's action following RAF Lancaster bomber WF183's take-off in 1943, life in the German town that was its allocated target, the bombing raid and the plane's return at night. The drama, threaded through the station's unchangeable schedule of news and current affairs from early morning to midnight – although it is the story of a night bombing raid. It starred Tom Baker, Frank Windsor, Sam West, Emma Chambers and Jack Shepherd and told how the raid had 'changed the lives' of many men and women – British and German.

Recent editions

• Harpercollins (1978) — ISBN 0-586-04544-9 (paperback)
• New American Library (1986) — ISBN 0-451-16243-9 (paperback)
• Chivers Press (1998) — ISBN 0-7451-3443-2 (hardback)
• Blackstone Audiobooks (2000) — ISBN 0-7861-1748-6 (cassette)

External links

• Book review