Without giving too much of the plot away 633 Squadron under Roy Grenville are given a near impossible mission to knock out a secret Nazi facility at the head of a Norwegian fjord. The task is a hard one to begin with but when promised Norwegian freedom fighters help does not appear it becomes doubly so.

This book was first published in 1956 so barely ten years after the end of WWII when memories were fresher and perhaps the book market was very different than those of today. This book went on to spawn a pretty successful movie spin off.

Unfortunately for me at least this book is showing its age. Too many of the characters are rather stereo-typical and two dimensional. The war weary but brilliant leader who falls in love despite his best efforts not to to a damsel in distress, the even more senior desk bound pilot who dreams of one last great mission, the gum chewing, recklessly brave North American (Canadian this time) and the buxom bar maid with a good heart but loose-ish morals. Much of the drama is told from the viewpoint of those on the ground and the action when it arrives is dealt with in a pretty breathless and cursory fashion.

Given that it is 70 years since the end of WWII it is perhaps fitting that we are reminded of the many brave men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice. As such if you are looking for a piece of escapism which is not too taxing on the little grey cells than you can do worse. ( )

A good RAFnovel which was made into a so-so film but with beautiful flying shots of Mosquitos back inthe 1960s when flying Mosquitos were available. The novel is about a Mosquito squadron which is tasked to attack a secret target.
This film and the subsequent film Mosquito Squadron helped to reduce the Mosquito population by their filming techniques. ( )

I remember reading this first in March 1975; I was eleven. Back then I was young enough to be very much impressed by the film. In the intervening 37 years, my regard for the film has waned but reading the book for the umpteenth time, it still captivates. Why? Because the film is a routine actioner but Smith knew what every great writer knows; that the books that last are about people.

There is some stuff in here about a raid on a secret German installation in Norway, but who cares? That's just the McGuffin, anyway. Smith sets out his stall in the first chapter:
“…Folks want to hear the real stuff - how those boys felt during their training, the girls they had, what they let out when they were drunk, how they felt on the last day…. The human stuff!”
That's what's in this novel.

This is a story about people. Principally, it is a story about a light bomber squadron of the RAF in the Second World War. It is a portrait of the bizarre existence bomber crews led; in the pub with the locals one evening, in the heat of battle next day, back to the pub (if they survived) in the evening. It looks at the terrible attrition suffered by squadrons (I believe the 2 Group of Bomber Command sustained a casualty rate second only to the U-boats). There are pilots from the Dominions (as there must have been in every Bomber Command squadron) and from America (not an anachronism; it was only the US fighter pilots who transferred en masse to the USAAF in 1942). It looks at the intense bonds that formed between fighting men and the psychological costs of war. Of course, all this has been done since, many times, so that much of it is now clichéd. Yet this was one of the first books of the kind and remains one of the best.

Above all, this book makes you care. I am put in mind of Douglas Adams' explanation for the whale in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He reminds us of the TV series Cannon in which there was always one character whose sole function was to be pointlessly killed, without anyone apparently giving a damn. Adams' riposte to this was the whale, whose sole function was to be pointlessly killed, but Adams determined that he would make the reader care about the creature. In a world of the video-game mentality, where characters in both books and films are killed off wholesale without any regrets, 633 Squadron is all the more welcome because a lot of people die in this book, but Smith will make you care about them. ( )