Bomber Command's campaign started on the very first day of the Second
World War and ended within a few hours of the final victory in Europe
five and a half years later. It was an attempt to win the war in Europe
by strategic bombing on such an enormous scale that historians have only
recently begun to piece together the finer details of the individual
raids.
There have been many books about Bomber Command, but Martin Middlebrook,
the aviation historian, and his research colleague, Chris Everitt, were
the first to compile a complete review of all the raids and the
background stories to this fascinating campaign. They undertook the
gargantuan task not only of documenting every Bomber Command operation
but also of obtaining information from local archives in Germany, Italy
and the occupied countries, on the effects of the raids. Little of this
material had been published previously, and never before had the two
sides of Bomber Command's war been brought together in this way.
The Bomber Command War Diaries has become the standard basic work of
reference on this extraordinary campaign. This edition includes
retrospective observations and a new appendix.