I don’t know if it was because this was the first book I read using my Sony Reader or some inherent fault in the book itself but I found this account of the fire raids on Hamburg to be an unsatisfying effort.
The author has tried his best to stitch together survivor accounts from both the RAF bombers and the poor bloody Germans to get that “there” feeling in his story but it doesn’t work. The book is lacking in detail and it just feels like he tried to make a 700 page book out of a 50 page story. Maybe it’s the fact that the fashionable way to write these accounts nowadays is to get interviews with the low level combatants hasn’t helped him here because there’s just too few of them left in any condition to recount their experiences.
Additionally I found the book too ready to assign feelings of remorse or horror to the Allies which just isn’t borne out by other books I have read. From my experience the fliers were just thinking about how to survive their 30 op tours to really give two shits about the civilians they were incinerating below. This book felt like revisionism and to tell you the truth, I wish the Sony Book Store had a better return policy.
