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Cogs in a Fighting Machine

While reading Len Deighton’s Bomber (1970), I was reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s line – ‘To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.’ Bomber is a novel about the area bombing of Germany during the Second World War. Targeting German cities and civilians is a part of Britain’s war that is still extremely controversial. It doesn’t fit into the heroic narrative of the Battle of Britain, the Blitz or D-Day. Almost alone among British forces, bomber crews were not issued with a campaign medal when the war ended. The debate as to whether the bombing was a necessary evil or simply just evil continues to exercise historians and writers to this day.

Deighton is perhaps uniquely placed to answer the question. By the time he had completed Bomber, he probably knew more about the bombing campaign from both the Allied and the Axis perspectives than anybody, for his book was based on years of research. The acknowledgements, with their long list of veterans to whom he spoke, give you some idea of just how much work he put into Bomber – he even flew as a passenger in a Heinkel so he could understand what German fighter crews had experienced.

The story takes place over twenty-four hours in June 1943 in three main locations: a British bomber airfield in East Anglia, a German radar station in Holland and a small German town called Altgarten near the Dutch border. The cast is vast but there are a few principal characters around whom the narrative is anchored. On the British side there’s Samuel Lambert who pilots a Lancaster bomber known as the Creaking Door. Despite captaining the plane, he isn’t an officer. In fact he is disliked by some of his seniors because he’s not what would

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While reading Len Deighton’s Bomber (1970), I was reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s line – ‘To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.’ Bomber is a novel about the area bombing of Germany during the Second World War. Targeting German cities and civilians is a part of Britain’s war that is still extremely controversial. It doesn’t fit into the heroic narrative of the Battle of Britain, the Blitz or D-Day. Almost alone among British forces, bomber crews were not issued with a campaign medal when the war ended. The debate as to whether the bombing was a necessary evil or simply just evil continues to exercise historians and writers to this day.

Deighton is perhaps uniquely placed to answer the question. By the time he had completed Bomber, he probably knew more about the bombing campaign from both the Allied and the Axis perspectives than anybody, for his book was based on years of research. The acknowledgements, with their long list of veterans to whom he spoke, give you some idea of just how much work he put into Bomber – he even flew as a passenger in a Heinkel so he could understand what German fighter crews had experienced. The story takes place over twenty-four hours in June 1943 in three main locations: a British bomber airfield in East Anglia, a German radar station in Holland and a small German town called Altgarten near the Dutch border. The cast is vast but there are a few principal characters around whom the narrative is anchored. On the British side there’s Samuel Lambert who pilots a Lancaster bomber known as the Creaking Door. Despite captaining the plane, he isn’t an officer. In fact he is disliked by some of his seniors because he’s not what would now be described as a ‘team player’ – literally in this case, since he refuses to play for his squadron cricket eleven despite his skill as a bowler. This annoys the Group Captain, a man fond of sporting metaphors who at one point says: ‘Cricket’s a little like flying in combat . . . long leisurely times in the pavilion followed by a brief moment when a chap faces some fast bowling.’ There’s something of the Angry Young Man about Lambert in his disdain for this public- school insouciance. As with other Deighton novels such as The Ipcress File (memorably made into a film starring Michael Caine), class permeates the British. The RAF is presented as snobbish and hidebound by rules: ‘The English believe that only gentlemen can be leaders,’ points out one character. But the class system isn’t Lambert’s only problem. Early on in the novel, he speaks out against bombing civilian targets and is quickly slapped down. Far more to the taste of the senior officers is Captain Sweet, an unpleasant, scheming figure who lacks Lambert’s experience and leadership qualities but who has been regarded as officer material from the day he joined up: ‘He had a clear, high voice, energy, enthusiasm and an unquestioning readiness to flatter and defer to the voice of authority.’ The German scenes revolve around August Bach, a widower and commander of the radar station in Holland, whose young family is over the border in Altgarten. He is falling in love with the children’s nanny, Anna-Luisa, who is barely out of her teens. Initially she is portrayed as a naïve dreamer but she’s not quite all she seems. The other principal Germans include the Mayor of Altgarten, the Burgomaster, who is more preoccupied with organizing his birthday party than with the war, and Löwenherz, an ace fighter pilot whose job it is to intercept RAF bombers. He’s from an old military family and is torn between doing his patriotic duty and speaking out against the full horrors of the Nazi regime. Deighton avoids the caricature of heel-clicking Germans. Even those who commit the worst deeds, such as the amoral Viennese doctor Hans Furth, are humanized and even made appealing. The main plot is simple. A huge force of 400 British aeroplanes flies over to Germany to destroy the industrial city of Krefeld. It is the job of Germans such as Löwenherz and Bach to stop them. However, within that plot lie a swirl of subplots in which characters scheme, fall in love and experience personal triumphs and failures; and all the while we are never allowed to forget that every single one of them is a human being. Bomber’s enormous cast includes airmen, soldiers, firemen, nurses, doctors, wives and civilians of all descriptions. Deighton’s skill is in sketching them so deftly that the reader is never confused. It’s not only the characters who have back stories. The sleepy market town of Altgarten is given such a rich history that you will be surprised to learn it is not a real place. Deighton is particularly good at writing about inanimate objects. Each Lancaster bomber, such as the aptly named Creaking Door, has its own personality. Julian Symons, a crime writer and contemporary, once remarked that Deighton was the only person he knew who actually liked machines. In Bomber the men are merely tiny cogs in a fighting machine. ‘It’s as though the plane goes to bomb Germany of its own predatory volition, as though it takes us along just for the ride,’ explains one character. Men and machines come together in a cinematic climax. The switches between Germany, Holland and Britain that had taken place over chapters now take place over paragraphs or even lines. Deighton describes aerial combat thus: ‘three groups of men using every device that science could invent began to grope around the blackness like gunmen in a sewer’. If intercepting aircraft is a haphazard affair then precision aerial bombing is a chimera. The British plan quickly unravels. A German fighter shoots down a British light aircraft. The crew jettison their marker bombs over Altgarten rather than over the industrial city of Krefeld. The British are convinced they have the right target because on radar Altgarten’s greenhouses look like enormous factories. As the bombs fall and explode among the town’s wooden houses, a dry wind whips up a firestorm. Deighton’s description of a town being destroyed building by building is a tour de force. Area bombing as practised by the Allies is presented in horrific detail: ‘even after the last of the bombers had departed the effectiveness of the fire-fighting and salvage teams would be hampered by the delayed-action bombs. They would continue to explode for two more days.’ Those few who survive are terribly damaged: ‘it was the beginning of a mental breakdown from which they would never recover’. Rather as in Game of Thrones, characters with whom we have engaged are discarded with shocking suddenness and often appalling violence. Kokke, a German pilot, is killed by a bird through the wind-screen: ‘it was impossible to distinguish where the bird’s remains ended and Kokke’s face began’. Another major character survives the raid only to die in a motorcycle accident after he has landed. Deighton follows his characters’ thoughts to the bitter end; there is even an epilogue in which the surviving characters’ lives are sketched in a way that is both bathetic and peculiarly moving: ‘Peterson lives in Montreal and is vice-president of a small company that makes camping equipment.’ Bomber is also at times a very funny novel: ‘You don’t believe in this war,’ says Cohen, one of a Lancaster’s crew. ‘Believe in it? . . . you make it sound like a rumour,’ Lambert replies. The Viennese doctor Hans Furth is described as ‘nibbling the German language like sachertorte’; Gerda Pippert, who gatecrashes the Burgomaster’s dinner in Altgarten, thinks it ‘the most exciting prospect she could remember since her holiday in Heidelberg in 1938’; and Voss, a German tailor, muses: ‘Some people said things against them, but the Nazis had done wonders for the uniform business, whatever other faults they might have.’ We are used to the First World War being depicted as bleak but the popular view of the British role in the Second is largely the creation of stirring films such as The Dam Busters or sentimental songs. In Bomber there are no patriotic clichés and nobody is ennobled by war. At the end of the novel the surviving British bombers return to East Anglia. The crews congratulate themselves on a job well done but a lowly WAAF corporal looks at the photos taken from the aircraft and realizes they have missed their target. The men are going to have to go back on the next clear night and finish the job. This ending also reminded me of Solzhenitsyn and his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which depicts the struggle to survive just one day in the Gulag. Bomber shows only one day in one small theatre of the war. Tomorrow there will be more bombing raids, not just over Germany, but over other parts of occupied Europe and over Japan. The horrors of a botched raid on a town such as Altgarten won’t even get a mention in the history books. Deighton leaves the reader to make up his or her own mind about the morality of area bombing. In Bomber he is simply saying, this is how it was, and it’s impossible to argue with that.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Henry Jeffreys 2018


About the contributor

Henry Jeffreys’ book Empire of Booze: British History through the Bottom of a Glass was published in 2016.

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