The Bombers: The Illustrated Story of Offensive Strategy and Tactics in the Twentieth Century Hardcover

First Edition 1987

Coffee Table Book

In The Bombers, Robin Cross follows the history of the bomber from its emergence in specialized form in the First World War to the present day. Not merely a book about the machines of war, it is also an account of the men who designed and flew them, the fighter pilots whose business it was to shoot them down and the civilians whom the advent of the bomber thrust into the front line of warfare.

Detailed and illustrated analyses of design breakthroughs and flaws, armaments and tactics, crucial operations and notable disasters is placed in the wider context of the moral and practical arguments about the proper use of the bombing arm, not only in both World Wars but also in the interwar and post-1945 years. These arguments, first rehearsed in 1914-18, were to reemerge during the Spanish Civil Was, in acute form in the period 1943-45 and later during Vietnam.

A series of superb panoramas specially commissioned to illustrate crucial bombing operations are supplemented by well researched photographs and diagrams. Ranging from the wind whistling in the wires of the heavies developed in 1917-18 to the ultra-sophisticated electronics of contemporary strike aircraft, this book is an essential account of one of the principal weapons of Twentieth century warfare

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