Bristol Beaufighter - John F. Hamlin

 

There I was sitting at my local cafe, kids-back-at-school celebratory coffee and book session delayed by one day, when I get a phone call from the post office to say I had a parcel that had somehow missed the day's delivery. A short walk and 4.5 kg of Air-Britain magic was in my hands. Flintham's Truculent Tribes bargain and the 2022 Propliner were incidental to the real reason for the order: John Hamlin's Bristol Beaufighter made up most of the weight, 420+ pages of glossy A4 hardback goodness to be exact.

 

It is a beautiful book and is loaded with superb photos, all magnificently reproduced on quality paper and leaving few aspects, if any, of the aircraft to the imagination. There is a surprising amount of colour too, from ‘sidebars’ to period advertisements and a great number of clean profiles that feature some of the rarer markings seen on Beaufighters.

 

I am not an Air-Britain aficionado or member. While I love all aviation to varying degrees, my focus is fairly obvious, so I’ve never been able to justify membership of an organisation with a much broader (and understandable) remit. The few A-B books I’ve seen – Hamlin’s earlier Flat Out, the history of No. 30 Squadron, for example, was bought secondhand – are unsurpassed on the quality front, but I’ve never been one for lists of serial numbers, as useful as they are for regular referencing. The 240 pages of Beaufighter serials, a la Morgan and Shacklady’s Spitfire: The History (but on far superior paper stock!), are the raison d'être of this book and clearly the product of years of work. That’s a big chunk of an expensive book. What’s left is roughly 20 pages of the type’s development, including a column and a half on the Australian production line, ten pages of an ‘Operational overview’ and then a comprehensive 100 pages of potted histories of the units (squadrons, wings, OTUs, etc.) and air forces that flew the Beaufighter, which is effectively a longer ‘operational overview’. The appendices are also of interest, but everything outside of the serials section is all too brief. 

The unit listing is impressive and there’s some fascinating inclusions, although the South Africans deserved more than two pages, despite only having the two units. Happily, the Royal Australian Air Force – squadrons and support units – gets a decent ten pages, the USAAF five and everyone else (France, Turkey, Portugal, Israel and the Dominican Republic) seven. However, again, it’s all in overview territory. There’s little more than the occasional one-liner quote from aircrew, but that’s perhaps a rabbit hole the author didn’t want to/couldn't go down. 

 

Speaking of the personal connection, there is a sobering tribute in the later pages dedicated to those who became casualties while serving with a Beaufighter unit (killed, wounded/injured, prisoners, etc.). Three columns per A4 page for 20 pages. It is a lovely inclusion. Imagine, though, the power of including the words of some of those listed or their contemporaries – giving them a voice. It would have made for a much longer book, of course, or a mighty second volume, but perhaps this is one of the few paths A-B rarely treads (if at all).

 

The Beaufighter’s full story continues to this day with long-term restorations to flight underway and great work being done on Hercules engineering in Queensland, Australia. Coupled with recent wreck discoveries, and even the important recovery of crew remains over the years, it is clear the type’s history did not end when the last airframe left military service. Again, the inclusion of such material was probably beyond the parameters the author was required to work within but would have highlighted the present stature of the Beaufighter in today’s historic aviation community and its exciting future. Extend that to a survey of the few surviving examples and the story is (more) complete. All this present-day material is, granted, nice to have.

 

It's a Beaufighter book and that's why I now own a copy and, if you're a fan, you should too. It is good, but it is not the comprehensive treatment expected. I wanted more, what it says on the tin, ‘The Full Story’. It is an expensive book and will be a standard reference, though the cost needs to be weighed with what the reader is after. It's more than just a serial number listing, and there are some gems throughout, but if you're after an in-depth narrative on the type, how it influenced strike operations, what it was like to live with and fly, this is not the book for you. Indeed, there's still not one book that can do that (but have a look for Neville Parnell's Beaufighters over the Pacific, Graeme Gibson's forthcoming Road to Glory, Athol Sutherland Brown's Silently into the Midst of Things, and anything relevant by the great Roy Conyers Nesbit, to name a few). It is, however, certainly the most significant overall Beaufighter title since Chaz Bowyers’s 1970s/80s works.

 

ISBN 978-0-95130-5-127

Beaufighter Boys - Graham Pitchfork

It was a little orange hardback, long since bereft of its dustcover, assuming it ever had one, the embossed floral design being at odds with the content. Its title now forgotten, perhaps something like ‘American Aces of the Second World War’, I read it from cover to cover, over and over again, borrowing it from the school library incessantly (I was at elementary school in the US at the time). It was a collection of stories of the great flyers of the USAAF – Gentile, Blakeslee, Bong – at least, that’s who I remember. So, an anthology was a major influence for this lark.

Could it be argued the anthology is replacing the memoir when it comes to Second World War aircrew books? It’s probably a bit of a stretch, but with ‘untold’ personal accounts drying up as time marches on, can a collection of memories, a collection of mini-memoirs if you will, be as effective? Certainly, the biography has assumed the mantle of ‘best personal insight’, but this too will struggle to capture the subject’s voice unless substantial and comprehensive supporting material can be accessed post-death. Therefore, the anthology of personal recollections can punch above its weight due to it presenting valuable firsthand accounts, admittedly in direct competition with periodicals (whose bread and butter is briefer reading material) and online sources. On the latter point, the anthology can also benefit from the poor attention span many apparently suffer due to social media’s method of presenting information. The ability to dip in and out, knocking off relatively unrelated chapters in short reading stints, is a strength of the anthology. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Grub Street’s Boys series has done so well. To date, the series has presented collections featuring various Cold War types, so the timing is perfect too as the middle-aged reader reminisces about many of the aircraft on the frontline during their childhood. The first move away from this period, however, comes from one of the series’ regular contributors. Having spent years gathering material for a different project that ultimately didn’t come to fruition, Graham Pitchfork delivers Beaufighter Boys. Covering almost every wartime operational use of the Beaufighter, and a post-war one, this is the ideal read for anyone with a penchant for the most pugnacious of heavy fighters.

The Beaufighter was one of those aircraft that seemed to be everywhere, always getting the job done. Consequently, the content of the book spans the globe. Each chapter concentrates on a specific aspect of wartime flying in the type. Some are mini-biographies while others focus on one tour, period, or even just a sortie, as recounted by the pilot or observer (or sometimes both). The chapters can therefore be read as standalones. There is little to no development from one to the next so snatching a chapter here and there is easy if you don’t have the time. 

Importantly, in among the extensive accounts of shipping strikes, operations for which the Beau is best known in the North Sea and the Mediterranean, there are several accounts of the work the crews did at night. A Battle of Britain veteran in its own right, something often forgotten, the type eventually took over night fighting from the hard-pressed, but effective, Defiant crews. This world of AI radar, ground control intercepts, vectors, blips and darkness, extended beyond defence of the British Isles. Beaufighters were active at night over North Africa, and out of Malta, and flew intruder ops, hunting German night fighters among other things, over Europe. This all seems quite obvious if you’ve been reading on the subject for even just a short while, but this sort of work tends to get lost among the accounts of the strike wings. Not here, though. If anything, the chapters covering these sorties were the stars, in a book full of highlights, simply because I hadn’t read about them for a long time. Indeed, probably the last time I read about Beau night fighters over the Med in detail was in the Bob Cowper memoir Chasing Shadows. To give a further indication of the breadth of coverage in BB, about the only night fighting/interceptions not featured was that done by the Beaufighters in India. Never fear, however, there’s plenty of other India/Burma action to keep the reader enthralled.

Naturally, those who have provided their reminiscences, or have been written about, are enduringly fascinating. There are some very familiar names (and several have written books of their own) – Tom Pike, Atholl Sutherland Brown, Bill Mann, Charles Read, Dennis Spencer, and Des Curtis to name a few – but also a lot of relatively forgotten men. Every nationality, more or less, that flew the Beaufighter, be it within their own air force or with the RAF, is featured with notable exceptions (most probably due to the relatively small population of surviving veterans) being South Africans serving in the SAAF units and those few Americans who flew second-hand Beau night fighters over the Med and Italy while waiting for the P-61 Black Widow to arrive in theatre. For a book to cover so much ground in just over 220 pages is impressive.

Some of the chapters, or parts thereof as several include memories contributed by more than one veteran, feel like they were originally written for magazine features. Indeed, one of the introductions even includes ‘writes Graham Pitchfork’. This is understandable given the decades of work the author has performed highlighting forgotten aircrew, and men behind the medals, for UK based aviation periodicals. It is also the nature of the anthology to an extent. I haven’t read any other titles in the Boys series because, well, jets, but I can only assume this book follows a similar format, albeit with a range of operations more extensive than its predecessors. 

A strong feature of the chapters, and the new sections within a chapter, is the early inclusion of a headshot, or crew shot or better, of the men telling the story. This is a lovely, simple tool to immediately put a face to a name. The rest of the photos are liberally sprinkled throughout the text with, it would appear, some attention paid to keeping the lower quality ones smaller so as not to show too much ‘grain’ on the paper stock used. There is, however, some funky text wrapping here and there with little blocks of text floating on a sea of white space next to a photo. This leaves some pages looking a little clunky, but they’re not much of a distraction in the great scheme of things. After all, we’re talking Beaufighters and their crews here!

One of my great bugbears with the Beaufighter, and the reporting of its history, is the continued use of its apparent nickname, ‘Whispering Death’, and its (never proven by evidence) Japanese origin. Why this myth continues to perpetuate is beyond me when the likes of Chaz Bowyer, for one, in the seventies, debunked it as a RAF creation to make fun of journalists. In the interests of full disclosure, I wrote to Grub Street when I saw the dismaying use of the nickname on the original cover design for BB. It was, happily, replaced, but still rears its head (once, thankfully) on page 19. Coupled with referring to the engines as being of the ‘rotary’ type (as opposed to radial) in the introduction, minor repeated typos, some swapped captions and a reference on page 120 to something mentioned on page 103, that’s not there, there’s a little undercurrent of the production feeling a bit rushed in places. 

However, superbly curated by the author, as ever it’s the aircrew accounts that make this book stand out, and the excellent overall production standard of the thing itself. The dustcover design is repeated on the boards, as appears standard for Grub Street these days, and the combination of the shades of blue, and the white font of the title, makes it really pop on the shelf. 

There are few things better than reading an anthology from those who were there and Beaufighter Boys delivers in spades.

ISBN 978-1-911621-44-7