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A review by johnmarlowe
The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945 by Richard Overy
3.0
This novel’s style was aggravating, with full pages or more of a single paragraph. I wouldn’t describe this style as enjoyable or easily readable at all. I was glad that the real length of the novel was 200 pages less than the 636 pages that were in the e-book. The rest was footnotes.
The Americans and the British were obsessed with bombers in WWII. On the American side, that was evident in just one instance, which was the production of the B-24 Liberator (a somewhat ironic term after reading this book) by Ford Motor Company at the Willow Run airplane assembly plant. Eventually, a “bomber an hour” was produced there. Britain was just as obsessed, although their obsession was for the U.S. to produce as many bombers as we could in order to help them.
This book was by and large sickening to me, because of the detailed explanations of everything that has to do with bombing and being bombed during war. The whole point of bombing a country is to destroy property and kill or maim the civilian population so that they are either demoralized or unable to work in the war effort. The documentation of thousands of people killed as a result of inaccurate bombing was horrifying. These sentences in the book were disturbing: “The temptation to reach for airpower when other means of exerting direct violent pressure were absent proved hard to resist. Bombing had the virtues of being flexible, costing less than other military options, and enjoying a high public visibility, rather like the gunboat in nineteenth-century diplomacy”
The Americans and the British were obsessed with bombers in WWII. On the American side, that was evident in just one instance, which was the production of the B-24 Liberator (a somewhat ironic term after reading this book) by Ford Motor Company at the Willow Run airplane assembly plant. Eventually, a “bomber an hour” was produced there. Britain was just as obsessed, although their obsession was for the U.S. to produce as many bombers as we could in order to help them.
This book was by and large sickening to me, because of the detailed explanations of everything that has to do with bombing and being bombed during war. The whole point of bombing a country is to destroy property and kill or maim the civilian population so that they are either demoralized or unable to work in the war effort. The documentation of thousands of people killed as a result of inaccurate bombing was horrifying. These sentences in the book were disturbing: “The temptation to reach for airpower when other means of exerting direct violent pressure were absent proved hard to resist. Bombing had the virtues of being flexible, costing less than other military options, and enjoying a high public visibility, rather like the gunboat in nineteenth-century diplomacy”