A Simple Celebration

Book excerpt: Amid the carnage and destruction of World War II, RAF's Bomber Command's efforts to blast Germany into submission would emerge as one of the bloodiest and most protracted campaigns of the war—this is the story of those who braved the killing skies of Nazi Germany. Facing the ravages of marauding night fighters, roving searchlights, flak, and freezing temperatures that adhered flesh to metal and coated their lumbering machines in layers of ice, thousands of young British and Commonwealth airmen met violent ends above the cities they reduced to blazing ruins. Of the 125,000 men who flew with Bomber Command, more than 55,000 perished in the tortured skies over Nazi-dominated Europe.