Cassell Military Classics: Looking Into Hell: Experiences of the Bomber Command War

by Mel Rolfe

What was it like to fly through enemy skies, flak bursting, searchlight beams criss-crossing your route, enemy fighters likely to appear from nowhere? How did it feel to lose friends and colleagues... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0304354465
• ISBN13: 9780304354467
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Cassell
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Exciting, Personal Histories of RAF Bomber Crews

Looking Into Hell is a highly readable book about the crews of the RAF. Most oral histories I have read center around the 8th Air Force flight crews. I had not read any books about the RAF crews but I am happy I read this one. Their experiences were the same as the Americans - fighting the German airplanes, getting shot at, avoiding flak, getting shot down, and so on...and fighting at night! This book contains 20 short stories, mostly from the Lancaster air crews, about fighting over Germany. Rolfe writes exceptionally well about their adventures and incorporates the crews' oral history along with his own narrative. I found it quite readable. If you are not familiar with any of the RAF airplanes, I recommend viewing the aircraft via the internet to give you an idea of what they flew. It will help when they talk about the Blenheim, or the Sterling, or the Lancaster. I found no faults with book and I recommend it to anyone interested in the perils of the RAF crews.

Exciting Stories of Dicey RAF Bomber Ops!

Unlike their American counterparts, the experiences of WWII RAF bomber crewmen haven't been well-chronicled. Mel Rolfe is one author that has worked at filling that gap; LOOKING INTO HELL being his latest book on Bomber Command at war. The night battles waged by RAF bombers were equally as horrendous and costly as the day missions flown by USAAF crewmen. In one of the 20 stories Rolfe relates in this book -'Stretching Luck to the Limit' - he mentions that 35 crewmen reported to 102 Squadron in March 1941. Seven months later only one(!) was still alive. Rolfe has a nice writing style. You get to know each member of the crew involved in that particular mission and then follow them as they wing their way into Germany. First-person narratives abound in this book as pilots, air gunners, navigators, etc. relate how their shot-up Wellington struggled home on one engine, how they survived when their Lancaster disintegrated after a mid-air collision and the adventures of a shot-down crew adrift in the North Sea. The reminiscences are exciting, harrowing, and oft times sad as when the sole surviving member of a bomber relates the last flight of his aircraft. In short, this is a wonderful, poignant tribute to the brave men of Bomber Command.