Descriere & specificații

Most of the deeds of Bomber Command's war are well documented. In the main, the wartime record of each squadron's service, written with reasonable accuracy at the time, is available for scrutiny. As a result, many heroes have emerged since the end of the war, and the full extent of the various roles performed by Bomber Command's squadrons is a matter of history. There is just one exception. Such was the secrecy surrounding the activities of the moon squadrons at Gibraltar Farm, which became RAF Tempsford, that records, initially at least, were a luxury only occasionally indulged in. Brief hand-written entries allow a glimpse into this end of the Special Operations Executive, an organisation, which dispensed information on the strictest need-to-know basis. It was not unusual in the early days for a pilot to arrive at Tempsford on posting, only to kick his heels for days and even weeks, before being given an insight into the station's activities and his part in the grand plan. Later on, the demand to service resistance organizations saw crews pressed into service with much greater alacrity, but the level of security never wavered. The greater one's insight into SOE and SIS matters, the more insistent becomes the question, how did they do it? In 1943 and 1944, with all the latest electronic gadgetry to hand, giant armadas of bombers were failing to find the centre of huge urban areas like Berlin, Stuttgart, Hanover, Leipzig and Nuremberg. Meanwhile, Whitley crews in 1940 and 194