Book Review: The Boy with Only One Shoe

November 30, 2020December 3, 2020 ~ Adam Purcell

It’s a familiar sort of story:

World War II begins. At first, the boy is too young, but he enlists in aircrew the instant he turns 18. Basic training follows and he’s awarded an aircrew brevet. Then comes operational training, crewing up, converting onto big four-engined bombers. The new crew joins a squadron, flies on operations and has one or two close calls. Then the war ends.

Call it a fairly standard career for a surviving member of Bomber Command. With greater or lesser degrees of variation, stories like this have been told in countless books over the years. Yes – the story of John Henry Meller, in the new book The Boy with Only One Shoe, follows much the same arc.

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But what’s notable about this book is that it’s been published in 2020, seven and a half decades since the end of the war. It’s the rarest of rare things: a recently-written first-hand account by a Bomber Command airman. There just aren’t many veterans left alive these days, let alone ones who still have the drive and skill to vividly write a story about events of so long ago – and then publish it.

To be clear, Meller’s daughter, Caroline Brownbill, a former airline pilot, is credited as a co-author. It’s not clear how much of the work is hers, but that doesn’t matter. The narrative is cohesive and in a consistent voice. Brownbill is also, it seems, doing a lot of the publicity work around the release of the book, which was self-published via Amazon in May 2020. The authors are planning to donate proceeds from sales of the book to the RAF Benevolent Fund, and Meller signs and writes a personal message on virtually every copy they sell, which is a nice touch.

John Henry Meller served as a wireless operator with 149 Squadron, flying operations on Lancasters from February 1945. That experience, and all the bits and pieces that go with it, necessarily forms the core of The Boy with Only One Shoe. But this book has so much more to offer too. The early sections about growing up in the English town of Warrington in the 1920s and 30s are detailed, and the descriptions of life as a teenage civilian in the early years of the war are full of life. Post-war, Meller remained in the Royal Air Force for a few years, and there are some very interesting sections about postings to exotic places like Egypt and Libya.

His personal recollections are great, and include some unusual details. I knew that RAF recruits, undergoing basic training in London, ate their meals in a restaurant at London Zoo, for example, but I didn’t know that while there they were also told that they would be responsible for “protecting or detaining” any of the zoo animals that might escape as a result of air raid damage. There’s also one of the better descriptions of the training and operational role of the wireless operator that I’ve seen in an aircrew memoir.

These are the sorts of details that you can’t easily get from official files and archives – you really need the recollections of someone who was there. There’s a fascinating discussion of a lecture attended during Meller’s wireless operator course, during which it was clearly communicated to the trainees exactly what risk they were taking by becoming aircrew. The fatality rate in Bomber Command at the time, they were explicitly told, was 46%. Common knowledge now, of course, and certainly by the time a crew had been on a squadron for a few months they would have been well aware of the ‘chop rate’, but this is the first time that I’ve heard of aircrew being directly told about it while still in training. It makes their decisions to continue that training all the more courageous.

The Boy with Only One Shoe – the significance of the title is explained in a short introductory section in the book – came about after Meller’s son in law persuaded him to write about his wartime experiences, primarily for his grand-daughter. The book is therefore pitched at an audience that may not have much understanding of Bomber Command and the context into which it fitted. Meller provides a lot of that context with explanations of what was going on in the wider conflict at the time, and while some of these bits aren’t done as well as the parts of the story based on his own experiences, he nevertheless manages to successfully weave his own story into the wider one.

My only criticisms about the book are, I think, a direct result of its self-published roots. The story is great and the writing is engaging, but in some ways the execution doesn’t do the story all the justice it deserves. Editing can be hit and miss, with the occasional superfluous punctuation and, on one occasion, “where” used in place of “were”. There are one or two minor errors in terminology that probably should have been picked up, too: cumulonimbus clouds are called “Cumulus Nimbus” on p.175, for example. Formatting inside is a little inconsistent, particularly when dealing with block quotes. There is a contents page, but it’s not very useful: it only lists “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2” and so on, despite all the chapters being individually titled. The cover – though attention-grabbing with an illustration of a Lancaster with an engine on fire – is printed on cheap stock and is not very hardy. My copy marked too easily, copping several dings from one or two trips in my bag.

Don’t get me wrong: I really liked this book, and Amazon’s global reach makes it very accessible to the widest possible audience. But it’s a great shame that this story was not picked up by a traditional publisher, who might have had the expertise to overcome the few niggles I had with it.

Putting that to one side, though, The Boy with Only One Shoe is a good read. It’s honest, engaging and true to life – and it’s a never-before-heard Bomber Command story, written by someone who was there. Well recommended.

ISBN 9781838046705 – jhmeller.com

Available from Amazon.

The authors sent me a review copy for this article, which was originally written for Aircrew Book Review.

Book Review: And Some Fell on Stony Ground, by Leslie Mann

July 9, 2018July 9, 2018 ~ Adam Purcell

While wandering my local remainders bookshop recently, I was surprised to spot a Bomber Command-themed book that I hadn’t heard of before. I was first attracted by the subtitle: A day in the life of an RAF bomber pilot. And when I pulled a copy out I saw an ungainly-looking twin-engined aeroplane on the cover. A Whitley! There are very few books about that part of the bomber war.

Sold!

As far as impulse purchases go, And Some Fell on Stony Ground, by Leslie Mann, turned out to be one of my better ones. At less than 200 pages it’s not very long. The novel centres on the thoughts of Pilot Officer Mason, a Whitley skipper, over a single day in June 1941. It follows him as he winds his way back to his aerodrome after an afternoon at the pub. It follows his preparations for an operation. It follows him as he climbs into his Whitley, takes off and points the nose towards Germany.

Despite being based on actual events, And Some Fell On Stony Ground is not, and does not claim to be, a history. There never was a Pilot Officer Mason who was on that particular operation in June 1941. The release from the bounds of strict accuracy allows the author to really run with things, with no fear of offending the purists or disrespecting those he served with. Mann opens the door and lets the reader in to the deepest feelings of his protagonist, and you get the strong idea he knows first-hand exactly what he’s talking about.

He does. Leslie Mann was in fact a rear gunner on Whitleys, shot down over Germany on the night of 19/20 June 1941. A raid on Dusseldorf, the same operation that’s depicted in the book. It’s pretty clear that it’s Mann’s own thoughts and feelings we are reading here. The result is very honest and searingly powerful. That its focus is on the early part of the bombing war, when aeroplanes like Whitleys and Hampdens were still front-line weapons, is an added bonus.

The concept of a fictional memoir naturally invites comparison with They Hosed Them Out, the book written by John Bede Cusack in the 1960s. But where Cusack’s original story is known to deliberately stretch the truth for the sake of a good narrative, somehow I get the feeling that Mann’s story doesn’t stray too far from how he experienced it. After his Whitley was shot down he was a prisoner of war for a little over two years, before being repatriated to England towards the end of 1943 on psychiatric grounds.

It’s evidently this last fact that led in the first place to the existence of And Some Fell on Stony Ground. Mann wrote it in the late 1940s, seemingly as a way of dealing with the demons that were still hanging around. It’s not clear whether anyone in his family knew about the manuscript until he died in 1989, and it took another quarter-century until it was released.

My edition of the book – which was published in association with the Imperial War Museum in 2014 – includes an introduction by Richard Overy, the distinguished and respected historian of The Bombing War fame. His writing places Mann’s story in context, both of the overall bomber offensive and of Mann’s own part in it. “The value of Leslie Mann’s perspective”, he writes, “lies in the explanation it gives of how it was possible for young men to endure this degree of combat stress and to continue flying.”

As the veterans of the bombing war die out, books like this will soon be one of the few ways we have to understand something of what it was like to live with the strain of continued operations, and how they coped with it. In that sense, And Some Fell on Stony Ground tells a vitally important and little-understood part of the story.

Mann, Leslie (2014). And Some Fell on Stony Ground: A Day in the Life of an RAF Bomber Pilot. Icon Books Pty Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Rd, London N7 9DP. ISBN 978-184831-720-8

Book Review: Barney Greatrex by Michael Veitch

November 20, 2017November 20, 2017 ~ Adam Purcell

Michael Veitch, I’d wager, has heard some pretty amazing stories in his time. He has, after all, filled three bestselling books with them. Flak (2007) was the first, and as Veitch writes in the introduction to that tome, “inside the head of every pilot, navigator or gunner who flew during the Second World War is at least one extraordinary story.” In Barney Greatrex, however – Veitch’s seventh book, and his fifth about aircrew in WWII – he just might have found the most astonishing story of them all.

Barney Greatrex – for that’s his name – was a 61 Squadron bomb aimer. The book begins with a good old-fashioned cliffhanger. A month after parachuting from his crashing Lancaster into occupied France, Barney witnesses the execution of a collaborator by members of the Maquis band he had become associated with. You’re drawn into the story immediately: what’s this bloke doing in France? How did he get there? What’s he doing with the Maquis? Veitch proceeds to answer those questions, and more, in his usual extremely readable fashion.

We get taken right back to the beginning, the story initially following a well-trodden path of family background, schooling, enlistment and training that is familiar to anybody who has read a book about Bomber Command aircrew. We’re 49 pages in before Barney reaches his squadron and begins flying on operations. This is not to say that the early part of the book is in any way boring. Veitch skilfully weaves explanations of things like the Empire Air Training Scheme through the narrative, and puts Barney’s experiences into the overall context of the war itself. There are one or two errors of fact (such as confusing which rudder pedal a pilot would use to cope with two engines out on one side), but generally he makes good use of the significant background knowledge that comes from countless hours and dozens of interviews with veterans conducted for his previous books, and the lifelong fascination with the aircrew of WWII that motivated those earlier projects.

The descriptions of flying during the Battle of Berlin period, and particularly of what happened following a mid-air collision over the ‘Big City’ in November 1943, are compelling reading. But then comes the fatal trip to Augsburg on 25 February 1944. Barney just manages to escape his crashing Lancaster before it hits the ground and tries to walk to freedom, but after a couple of days decides to seek help in a farmhouse he comes across – and it’s from this point that the story becomes truly incredible. Barney becomes actively involved with the French Maquis. Without giving too much away, the story involves several Resistance units, many hiding places, much cloak-and-dagger sneaking around, tense stand-offs, and somehow surviving many, many narrow squeaks. It’s the sort of stuff you used to read about in those Commando war comics (you did read Commando comics, right?) – and indeed, I found myself visualising the scenes in Commando-style black-and-white line drawings as I read the sections featuring Lieutenant Colonel Prendergrast and his merry band of ‘Jedburghs’. The difference, of course, is that the events described in Barney Greatrex actually happened.

It’s a rollicking read, one that I devoured in just two nights. The way Veitch writes – clear, respectful, occasionally awestruck – is an excellent fit for the story. When he writes how several interrogators, after Barney’s liberation, “took notes but mainly looked at him in stunned silence, mesmerised by the story of his adventure” I could easily imagine Veitch himself doing exactly that, as he researched the book.

A lot of the research for Barney Greatrex was, in fact, completed by two other men – Alex Lloyd and Angus Hordern – who, like Barney, are alumni of the exclusive Knox Grammar School in Sydney. The book has its genesis in a documentary project called For School and Country, which premiered at Knox in 2015. Veitch was approached to turn the story into the book, a task he took to with gusto.

It’d be hard not to make a good book out of the quality of source material and the bones of the story itself that Veitch had to work with, and Barney Greatrex more than lives up to the promise. It’s a very readable, informative and outright exciting book that opens up one more airman’s astonishing story to a mainstream audience.

Barney Greatrex: From Bomber Command to the French Resistance – the Stirring Story of an Australian Hero, Hachette Australia. ISBN 9780733637230

Book Review: From the Top of the Hill, by Kevin Peoples

February 13, 2017January 27, 2017 ~ Adam Purcell

Jack Peoples was nobody particularly unusual. One day in August 1915 the 18-year-old farmhand from country Victoria walked with his younger brother up a small rise near the family property. Leaving the younger boy at the top of the hill, he walked down the other side and into the nearby town of Mortlake to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force. He never came back, killed in action in France with no known grave.

The story was a familiar backdrop when a man named Kevin Peoples grew up. Sitting by the fire with his brother and sister, he would ask his father – who had been the boy who watched from the top of that hill as his brother Jack walked away – to “tell us about the day Uncle Jack went to war, Dad”. Aware of the shadow that the memory had cast on his father’s life, and aware of how little he knew beyond that oft-related vignette, Kevin would, after his father’s death, embark on a life-long journey to find the story of his lost uncle.

The result is a little blue self-published book named, appropriately, From the Top of the Hill, which I discovered after Tony Wright wrote about it in the Saturday paper a few months ago. It’s not a long book (I read it in a single afternoon), but it is a deeply heartfelt and honest account.

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Peoples breaks the book into three sections. The first is the shortest at just four pages and tells his father’s story, writing about how the “dark, solemn presence of Jack lived on the wall in the corner, directly above my father’s chair.” Oh how I can relate to that concept. The second bit (twelve pages) is what perhaps you’d expect from a self-published book like this: a reasonably straight account of what Peoples knows of Jack’s life. But it’s what comes next, and what makes up the remaining 45-odd pages of the book, that is what sets this little story apart.

Starting with watching his university history lecturer breaking down in tears when trying to describe the horror of what happened at Pozieres, Peoples explains how he came to understand something of what his father felt when thinking of Jack. He visits what’s left of the old homestead to which Jack never returned, describing how “the sad old ghosts of my people have come out to welcome us”. He searches in dusty files at the Central Army Records Office (this was in 1977, pre-National Archives of Australia online catalogues) for something tangible of his uncle’s life. He visits France, twice, and he watches as the Unknown Australian Soldier is entombed at the Australian War Memorial in 1993, feeling somehow that the man in the coffin is Jack even while knowing it’s pretty well impossible. “That’s the wonderful thing about being unknown”, he writes. “…we can all name him and claim him as our own.”

There are occasional little things that betray the book’s self-published origins: one or two typesetting errors, one photograph that’s been printed upside down, and some inconsistent editing: I’m not a fan of the way Peoples mixes the present tense with the past tense. But From the Top of the Hill is for the most part beautifully written, and occasionally reaches the eloquence of poetry. “I see a letter signed by my grandfather, which I push to one side and instead start writing down all the dates and statistics,” Peoples writes of viewing Jack’s files at the Central Army Records Office. “As I write I become conscious of an old brown couch, an open fire, long legs resting on the sides of the fireplace and a hill with a young boy sitting and watching his brother walk away.”

What’s clear is that Peoples realises the importance of place when trying to understand history. The description of his first return to the ruins of the family homestead hints of an even darker history to that place, nearby which 35 or more Aboriginals had been massacred in 1839. His first visit to France, in 1998, left him feeling like there was an “unease insisting this matter of Jack and me was not yet finished.” (Funnily enough, I can relate to that feeling too.) So he returned to France a decade later – and you’re going to have to read the book to find out what happens there.

I found From the Top of the Hill a sad but lovely tale, well-told. I can very much relate to several aspects of Kevin Peoples’ search for ‘Uncle Jack’, to his sense of story and place and to the way an old family story like this one can embed itself in your bones and not let go. Well worth a read.

From the Top of the Hill (ISBN 9780994570307) is available as a print-on-demand title from BookPOD Australia, $19.95

Guest Reviewer

December 22, 2016 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 1 Comment

It’s been a bit quiet around these parts recently.

There have been several distractions in recent months, both Bomber Command-related and outside. A few things have changed. But never fear – I’m still here, and I continue to write, read, and interview my way across the Bomber Command universe.

Occasionally I even get asked to write things for other people – like this article, just in time for Christmas, for my good friend Andy Wright. It’s a review of Norman Franks’ new book Veteran Lancs, and you can find it on Andy’s website Aircrew Book Review.

Thanks for your support of SomethingVeryBig, have a wonderful Christmas and, all going well, normal service will resume here early next year.

Lancaster Men at the Shrine

November 28, 2013December 6, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 1 Comment

Peter Rees, author of the highly successful book Lancaster Men, delivered a talk about his book tonight at the Shrine of Remembrance here in Melbourne..

Despite the shocking weather there was a good-sized audience of perhaps 100 people present, all of whom listened in some awe to a very thorough presentation which covered the main themes of the book and told some good stories. Peter made certain to mention that Lancaster Men was his publisher’s choice for a title, not his – there were, as he rightly points out, other aircraft flown by Australians in Bomber Command! He told some stories from ‘behind the scenes’ of researching and writing the book, like Ted Pickerd, a 463 Squadron veteran who who greatly assisted Peter’s research before he died last year. They would meet weekly at the Australian War Memorial to pore through documents and archives together, Ted still being in possession of his navigator’s eye for detail and accuracy coming to the fore. He also said that since publication the book has received strong support, so much so that it’s now on its third print run (and indeed the Shrine shop ran out of copies of the book tonight, like the Australian War Memorial did during the Bomber Command weekend in Canberra in June), and as a direct result of writing it he has received so many further stories from people who have read the book that he is planning a follow-up volume in a couple of years time.

A lively discussion followed the talk, with Dresden getting much of the attention – and, incredibly, adding their input from the audience were four Bomber Command veterans, three of whom had in fact been on the Dresden trip and who could add recollections of what they were told at briefing for that raid. That added a very personal, and quite immediate, touch to the discussion at hand.

Someone mistook me for an official photographer and asked me to organise a group photo of Peter with, yes, the Lancaster Men.

Left to right, we have Len Swettnam (a bomb aimer), Gerald McPherson (rear gunner), Peter Rees (author), John Wyke (another rear gunner), and Gordon Laidlaw (pilot).

Peter cites the lack of recognition given to Bomber Command and especially its returning veterans at the end of the war as one of the reasons he wrote his book. This event, of course, tied in with the Bomber Command exhibition which is now showing at the Shrine. And next week at the Shrine will be a panel discussion with, among others, Peter Isaacson, perhaps one of Australia’s most well-known Bomber Command airmen. It’s all evidence of the increase in awareness of Bomber Command in recent times.

At least a little bit of the credit for that should go to Peter himself. His very readable book has made some of the extraordinary stories of the ordinary airmen of Bomber Command accessible to a mass audience. That can only be a good thing, if the stories are to live on.

Bring on Volume Two!

The Shrine has placed a podcast of Peter’s talk on their website. The download is here.

EVENT: Lancaster Men – a talk by author Peter Rees at the Shrine, Melbourne, 28 November 2013

October 13, 2013October 13, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 1 Comment

I reviewed Peter Rees’ book Lancaster Men: The Aussie Heroes of Bomber Command on SomethingVeryBig back in May, and I reckon it’s one of the better Australian books about Bomber Command to come out in the last few years. As part of a number of Bomber Command-focused events scheduled at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne over the last few months of 2013, Rees will deliver a talk about his book at the end of November:

Date: Thursday 28 November 2013

Time: 17:30 for 18:00

Cost: Free, but a gold coin donation is welcome.

Bookings are essential and can be made online via this page.

EVENT: Flak – a talk by author Michael Veitch at the Shrine, Melbourne, 23 October 2013

October 13, 2013October 13, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell

Australian author, comedian and journalist Michael Veitch’s life-long obsession with the aeroplanes of WWII and the men who flew them manifested itself a few years back in a fantastic couple of books. Flak, published in 2006, and Fly, from two years later, are remarkable collections of short stories based on interviews that Veitch carried out with about a range of airmen who flew in many and varied parts of the Royal Australian Air Force (among them Pat Kerrins) – and even includes a couple of former Luftwaffe pilots who moved to Australia after the war.

The Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne will host a talk by Michael Veitch about his books and some of the airmen he interviewed later this month:

Date: 23 October 2013

Time: 5:30pm for a 6.00pm start

Cost: Free, but a gold coin donation appreciated.

For bookings, or for more information, follow this link.

Unfortunately I’m unable to attend this talk, but if anyone does, please leave a message here afterwards to let us know how it went.

Book Review: Lancaster Men: The Aussie Heroes of Bomber Command, by Peter Rees

May 29, 2013October 13, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 3 Comments

Published in April this year, Lancaster Men: The Aussie Heroes of Bomber Command is a new book by Australian journalist and author Peter Rees. It’s one of many books by Australian authors to be published on the subject over the last few years, and I think it’s one of the better ones.

Inspired by the stories told to him by Kathie Pickerd, daughter of Ted, a 463 Squadron navigator and later one of Australia’s highest-ranking Air Force officers, Rees began interviewing a large number of Bomber Command veterans and came to realise, he says, “that history had treated them harshly. It was time for their stories to be told in their own words.” The book, then, does not claim to be a definitive account of Australia’s role in Bomber Command – the Official Histories take care of that. Instead, it’s based on personal accounts taken from interviews, transcripts and memoirs, both published and unpublished. The result is a more or less chronological account of the experiences of Australians in Bomber Command, from enlistment to operations and from the earliest bombing raids to Dresden and beyond, as seen by those who were there. Given the vast spread of the campaign, over time, over different units and over a large geographical area, this is an appropriate way to look at things, though the concentration on Australians sometimes omits the airmen of other nationalities who flew in the same crews.

Rees’ journalistic talent is evident in his vivid descriptions and the book is well-written in an engaging style. The focus on the personal shows in the way that he tends to use first names for the main ‘storytellers’ throughout his book, and in some of the stories of off-duty life in wartime England, which arguably were as much a part of the experience of Australians in Bomber Command as the operational trips themselves. He also covers some interesting ground looking at life under the bombs – notably the effects of the 22 November 1943 raid to Berlin, which caused a tiger to escape from the zoo. The beast “made its way to the Café Josty, gobbled up a pastry and promptly [fell] down dead. […] Although nearly all the major hotels had been wrecked, the premier hotel of the Third Reich, the Adlon, survived relatively intact, but it had no heating and could muster up only cold cuts and potato salad.” (p.138) Stories like these add life to the history and are an important reminder that there were indeed people in those cities too.

There is a good section putting D-Day in the context of the war in general, and Bomber Command’s operations in the context of that (Chapter 26 and on and particularly p.242-243), and a very interesting discussion of the politics between Australia and Britain when dealing with Australian bomber crews, as evidenced by a ‘manpower fiddle’ that left 463 and 467 Squadrons short of aircrew in April 1944, when the British wanted to avoid disadvantaging RAF squadrons after the Australians demanded tour-expired airmen be sent home to fly against the Japanese (p.181 and on).

And then we get to Dresden, for which Rees says the reputation of the airmen has been unfairly tarnished. He is at great pains to note that it was not Arthur Harris who chose Dresden as a target (despite his copping much of the blame in the aftermath of the war), but Churchill (p.342). Rees’ sympathies clearly lie with the airmen but he gives, in my view, a reasonably balanced examination of the politics of the raid, explaining the origins of the inflated casualty figures and looking at the Dresden Stadt Museum to see current German views on the issue. The airmen who took part, he argues, “have had to wear the blame for the destruction wrought on the city for far too long due to their political leaders distancing themselves from responsibility.” (p. 356)

The only problem with Lancaster Men is that Rees is a journalist, not necessarily a historian. As a result historical rigour is not necessarily always present and he tends to take quotes directly from secondary sources without checking the original documents for accuracy. For example, he quotes the 467 Squadron Operational Record Book but cites another book (Dan Conway’s The Trenches in the Sky) as its source. He also takes figures for aircraft losses on the 10 May 1944 Lille raid directly from Rollo Kingsford-Smith’s memoirs without cross-checking with the ORBs… and so perpetuates the error that seven aircraft were lost on that trip from 463 and 467 Squadrons (it was only six – the mistake probably has its genesis in Nobby Blundell’s Squadron histories). He gets the figure right on a later page but the contradiction hasn’t raised any flags in the editing phase. Errors like these are an occupational hazard when dealing with personal accounts of history, particularly when those accounts were created upwards of seventy years after the events described, so it would have been nice to see a little more cross-referencing occurring.

But otherwise Peter Rees has painted a vivid picture of life as an Australian in Bomber Command. Lancaster Men is well-written, engaging, shocking, exciting, funny and sad, and well worth a read.

Lancaster Men (ISBN 9781741752076) is published by Allen & Unwin, and retails for AU$32.99.

An interview with Peter Rees, as broadcast on Radio National on ANZAC Day 2013, is available for download here.

Book Review: A Grave Too Far Away – A Tribute to Australians in Bomber Command Europe

January 25, 2013January 8, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 3 Comments

A Grave Too Far Away: A Tribute to Australians in Bomber Command Europe is a new book by military historian and lecturer Kathryn Spurling. Essentially the book comprises stories about many Australian aircrew who were killed in action during WWII, adding together with each name a little bit of information about their backgrounds and eventual fates. Interestingly for me, included in the book is a short paragraph or two about the crew of B for Baker, along with a photograph of my great uncle Jack.

The general intention of this book was to tell the stories of some of Australia’s Bomber Command airmen and the effects that their deaths had on the families they left behind. It was certainly a worthwhile aim, but unfortunately A Grave Too Far is somewhat let down in its execution.

The book has a definite Australian focus. This becomes quite parochial in places, with much criticism of the way that Australian airmen were placed under the unfettered control of the British. The focus continues even to the point of completely failing to mention non-Australian airmen in some crews or, as for the crew of B for Baker, relegating the names of the three Englishmen to an endnote. The author has made heavy use of records from the National Archives of Australia, predominantly files from the A9300 and A705 series (service records and casualty files). This is conceivably a reason for the lack of information on some of the other members of the crews – it’s far easier to get access to Australian service records than it is British. It is clear that Spurling has accessed and read an extraordinarily large number of files from the NAA, and she should be congratulated for that, but the result overall appears to have favoured quantity over quality. The sections where the author has had more information available from a wider range of sources are done quite well – for example those concerning Don Charlwood and her own father Max Norris – but where the NAA files were the only sources used there is little to tie the individual stories together. Consequently the book reads like an endless stream of names, facts and figures, presented in a repetitive and almost formulaic manner. As such, I must admit that it becomes rather monotonous to read at times.

Unfortunately the overall impact of the book is diminished by poor editing. In places it appears not to have been effectively proof-read at all, with confused sentences and spelling errors littered throughout and entire sentences apparently missing. There are also a number of factual errors and inconsistencies: for example, on a couple of occasions the conversion between metric and imperial weights is messed up, and more than once there is confusion between aircraft and aircrew numbers lost on the Mailly-le-Camp raid of 3 May 1944.

Kathryn Spurling’s father was a Bomber Command wireless operator (indeed, he is mentioned in the dedication). Consequently she has a close connection with the overall Bomber Command story. Perhaps here is an explanation for some of the deeper structural problems with this book. It would appear that the emotional impact of the material covered, when combined with the author’s very personal stake in the story, has gotten in the way of a more balanced result. A desire to honour as many individual Australians as possible is a noble one, but here it has interfered with the coherence and hence the quality of the narrative presented. This shows the danger of ‘history as a tribute’ – where emotion hinders the dispassionate analysis of the story and indeed affects the factual accuracy of the writing.

History is, by its nature, a very human subject, both in its making and in its telling. And humans are emotional creatures. As such, one would expect a certain amount of emotion to come out in the telling of a story like that of Bomber Command, its airmen and the families so many of them left behind. But in this case, that emotion has been allowed to influence the author too much, resulting in an apparent ‘scattergun’ approach that tries to do too much for too many different people. In the end, sadly, some of it is not done particularly well.

A Grave Too Far Away – A Tribute to Australians in Bomber Command Europe is published by New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd, ISBN 9781742571614. RRP $29.95.