525 pages, not inlcuding the bibliography and index.

A few excerpts:

"One of our officers had a connection with the Coca-Cola company and whenever a supply of Coke was sent to Bassingbourn, he'd see to it that some Scotch was included. It went down easy, and it got you girls. Our money got 'em too. We were paid three times what a British soldier got, and they had to resent that, especially since we used that overage to steal their women."

The mechanics were at their hardstands by 3:00 a.m., just as the flight crews were being awakened. The ordnance men and armorers had begun their work even earlier. Roused from their bunks minutes after the mission order was recieved, they headed out to the bomb dump to begin loading that day's allotment of destruction - five hundred 1000-pound bombs neatly stacked in pyramidal piles in a fenced-off enclosure the men called boom city.

The bombs were placed on long, low trailers, hauled to the planes, hoisted into their empty bellies with hand-operated winches, and hung on horizontal racks in the bomb bay. After the armorers inserted the fuses, they attached a cotter pin to the fuse mechanism of each bomb to prevent the propellor in its tail from spinning -- as it would on descent, when it was armed. This prevented the bomb from detonating on the plane. It was dangerous work, especially if the bomb

handlers, in their haste, fused the bombs before loading them on the plane. At Ridgewell, home of the 381st Bombardment Group, eleven bombs exploded under a Fortress. Where there had been a plane and twenty-three men, there was nothing but splinters of metal and bone.

Craziness came in different packages, and at least once it resulted in an excellent decision. Harry Crosby was unable to sight his primary target through a thick cloudbank. Both secondary targets were socked in as well, freeing the squadron to bomb a "target of opportunity," an Air Force euphemism for anyplace that could be conveniently creamed. Sighting a large German city through a clearing in the clouds, Crosby gave the OK sign to the pilot. Just as he heard the bomb doors opening, he looked down at his map and discovered that the city was Bonn.

He immediately hit his mike button. "All positions from navigator, I have another target. We can't bomb Bonn."

"Commander to navigator. Why not?"

"That is where Beethoven went to school."

Crosby happened to know this because he had read it on the cover of the phonograph record he had played in his room the night before the raid, Beethoven's 5th, a fitting musical prelude, he thought, for a mission into Germany. He had also read on the cover that Bonn was a university town, one of the most picturesque places in Europe.

After an outburst of "Oh, shits" from the crew, the pilot went along with Crosby, and sixty-three Forts passed over the city, some of them with their bomb doors open. Minutes later, they found a marshalling yard in the Rhur and obliterated it.

Hamburg was not so fortunate. A port city of nearly two million people, it was nearly annihilated by the first man-made firestorm in history. The firestorm was a deliberate act, achieved by a lethal combination of high-explosive and incendiary bombs. More civilians were killed in Hamburg than were lost in Great Britain during the entire Blitz.

At 1:00 am, the British bombers--over 700 of them, could be heard approaching. "Suddenly there came a rain of fire from heaven," recalled a Hamburg firefighter. "The air was actually filled with fire. A storm started, a shrill howling in the street. It grew into a hurricane so that we had to abandon all hope of fighting the fire.

Within twenty minutes after the raid began, a column of turbulent, heated air rose more than two and a half miles into the night sky. Superheated air raced through the city at speeds in excess of 150 miles an hour. Inside shelters, thousands suffocated as the fire sucked oxygen from the atmosphere. Bodies were reduced to ashes by radient heat, as though they had been cremated. The brains of fire victims fell from their burst temples and children "lay like fried eels on the pavement." said a witness.

The next day, Eighth Air Force gunner Jack Novey's Fortress flew over Hamburg after bad weather prevented it from finding its main target. "Even at 17,000 feet the heat was so intense that my face was prickling as if I were standing in front of an open fireplace," Novey wrote later. "I couldn't help picturing children down below." But even silent dissenters like Novey remained convinced of the correctness of their cause. The "Mad Dictator" had brought this down on himself, and for supporting him, the German people would have to accept even the death of innocents.