Maximum Effort by James Campbell

This is the high-tension, fast moving story of a Bomber Squadron savagely mauled in the great saturation raids on Germany. In an atmosphere charged with the tautness of a bomb-aimer's flak-lit compartment the lives, loves and fears of the men who manned the Halifaxes of Bomber Command are vividly, even brutally, portrayed. This is bomber warfare stripped of its glamour; warfare powerfully, yet authentic ally set against the background of the massive thousand-bomber attacks on Hitler's Third Reich. The fury of those night skies of early 1944 flames anew through the drama of men keyed to breaking point; men whose life-span was measured in days, sometimes in hours. Group Captain Dorton, the cold, calculating Commander who takes over a morale-shattered squadron; Carter, his Wing Commander flying; Shern Douglas, who knew no code of honour; the happy-go-lucky 'Kiwi' MacArthur; the tragic Pastone and the beautiful, passionate Terry who loved too well and too wisely; these and a host of others are brilliantly characterized. Here is action that surges to a nerve-tingling climax. James Campbell, himself a former bomber observer, does not depict the aircrews as the always intrepid, infallible flyers we have come to accept, but instead depicts them as they really were. It is a convincing psychological study of the bomber crews, and includes a clinical dissection of one of those cases which the R.A.F. so coldly classes as 'Lack of Moral Fibre'.

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