From hero to villain

Patrick Bishop’s much praised Fighter Boys brought new life to the story of the Battle of Britain; by analysing the backgrounds of the pilots he added a dimension of who-they-were to the well-known what-they-did. Rescued from the status of national myth, they became people again.

Trying the same with Bomber Boys is harder. Flying bombers had not the same dash: Guy Gibson likened it to driving a bus. And they were many, not a Few: 125,000 passed through Bomber Command. Hardest is the highly contested reputation of the bombing offensive. Once the scale of its devastation and carnage passed the point of comparability with that suffered in England, and then rose to apocalyptic levels, there was no moral high ground left. No knightly jousting in the clouds, just total war, fought in freezing darkness, with hideous death above and below. ‘Bomber’ Harris saw the root of the problem: ‘People didn’t like being bombed and therefore they didn’t like bombers on principle.