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Bomber Command Combats the V-1 Menace, 1943-1944
Steve Darlow
Size: 234 x 156mm
Pages: 224pp, 24pp of photos, maps and diagrams
ISBN: 1 902304 96 9
In the summer of 1944, in the skies over southern England a new era in international warfare
began. A German reprisal weapon, called the V1 or ‘flying bomb’, launches from occupied France,
would bring indiscriminate terror and panic to the civilian population of London and the Home
Counties. The German High Command hoped the weapon would not only revenge the Allied bombing
of their homeland, but seriously hinder Allied invasion plans. The Allies tried desperately
to prevent this new scourge diverting their attention from D-Day and the liberation of Western
Europe. It was the job of RAF’s Bomber Command to combat the new threat and in June the Deputy
Supreme Commander, Sir Arthur Tedder, wrote ‘from 23 June the offensive went forward with full
vigour … Though … I advised that air action could reduce, but not exterminate the menace’,
since bombing the sites was ‘using a sledgehammer for a tintack’.
This book relates how this massive strategic bombing force was used to counter the flying bomb
threat and how the airmen from the Commander-in-Chief right down to the aircrews and groundcrews
acted upon the decisions made. Decisions which would lead to many Allied airmen suffering serious
injury, many losing their lives or being captured by the enemy. Decisions which would inflict
further misery upon the oppressed population of the occupied countries.
In the book I have detailed all raids against flying bomb targets and covered raids against
other German secret weapons. I have told the story using fascinating photographic coverage,
previously unpublished records, intelligence information and graphic first hand accounts
provided by Bomber Command veterans, Luftwaffe nightfighter veterans and accounts from French
people who witnessed the whole German operation from the construction of the secret weapon
installations to the launching of the flying bombs.
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