Bomber Command
by Max Hastings · first published 1979
10mentions
3recommended by
5HN commenters
2014–2021first – last mentioned
60% recommend40% neutral
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A good book about the British Bomber Command is Bomber Command by Max Hastings. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Command-Pan-Military-Classic... https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-Zenith-Military-Classi... The book talks about the change in…
on “Norden bombsight” ↗I can recommend "Bomber Command" my Max Hastings for a very even handed account of the UK air campaign against Germany - my father was in the RAF in WW2 (not in bombers) and it's pretty difficult for me to combine the individual heroism…
on “Legacy of Agent Orange” ↗Bomber Command by Max Hastings. This book explained the change in Allies attitudes around bombing during WWII from "only barbarians bomb civillians" to the mass fire bombing of heavily populated cities. It was also…
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite non-fiction books of all time?” ↗Anybody interested in an excellent history of the WW II European bombing campaigns should pick up “Bomber Command” by Max Hastings. I covers everything from technology, to strategy, to ethics, and more. Top notch history book. https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-Zenith-Military-Classi...
on “What the 1949 film Twelve O’Clock High still tells us about air combat” ↗…could have afforded it I would have given them The Art of Electronics and the companion Student Manual. (This was in the 1990s. I haven't read the new version and I don't know how well it works today.) "Bomber Command" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Command-Pan-Military-Classic... I liked this book because it describes how we (the UK) went into world war 2 with ethical notions around not bombing civilian populations…
on “Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?” ↗…starting from a position of "do not bomb civilians" and ending with "fire bomb civilian populations to kill as many civilians as possible, in a probably horrible way" is covered nicely in Max Hastings' book "Bomber Command". http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Command-Pan-Military-Classics... http://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-A-Touchstone-book/dp/06... (Why are US book covers so weird?!) Wikipedia has a tl;dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command…
It's really interesting to read the history of Bomber Command. Max Hastings has a good book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Command-Pan-Military-Classic... I mention it because the book talks about the problem they had with targeting, and refinements they made.…
on “Bouncing bomb” ↗…packs was a particularly cruel accident. With bombing someone is making the choice to kill civilians. At least with drones they're trying (perhaps not hard enough) to avoid killing civilians. The book "Bomber Command" (Max Hastings) talks a little bit about the changing policy in WWII from "Do not kill civilians" to "Let's carry out horrific firebombing of German cities". (Also the death rate of bomber crews was…
on “Time travellers: please don’t kill Adolf Hitler” ↗I suggest people think about reading Solly Zuckerman "from apes to warlords" which includes his time doing statistical and operations research analysis on bombing. He didn't always make friends in Bomber Command.
on “When pop history bombs: a response to Malcolm Gladwell” ↗…I said about the same types of bombing done to cities in Germany, there is this account by the physicist Freeman Dyson who was a civilian scientist working for the Operational Research Section of RAF Bomber Command headquarters: >…We killed altogether about 400,000 Germans,* one third of them in the two fire storms in Hamburg and Dresden. The Dresden fire storm was the worst. But from our point of view it was only…
on “Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall (1945) [pdf]” ↗