Bomber Command

Bomber Command is Max Hastings’s history of the RAF strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Beginning with the limited and often ineffective operations of 1939, it follows the force’s expansion into a mass night-bombing arm capable of sending large formations of Lancasters, Halifaxes and Mosquitoes against German industrial cities.

Hastings examines the strategy associated with Commander-in-Chief Arthur Harris, the technical development of navigation and bombing methods and the extraordinary losses suffered by aircrews. He also confronts the destruction and civilian deaths caused in Germany and asks what the campaign achieved in relation to its human cost. First published in 1979, the work is nonfiction military history.