In this book I have tried whenever possible to draw on contemporaneous sources – letters, diaries, as well as official documents, etc. – supplemented by post-facto recollections and memoirs. So my first thanks – sadly posthumous in most cases now – are to all those men and women at every level of the wartime RAF who felt moved to write down their experiences. Why one person chooses to record events and another not is a mystery. I am just grateful that the impulse exists. Tattered journals, pale blue notepaper with the RAF crest, flimsy airmail letter-cards and faded ink are for me the mother lode as I go about my historical prospecting. Every nugget has value. Much of the writing has a freshness and honesty that is sometimes lacking in professional accounts. All of it reinforces my continuing wonderment at the qualities and achievements of an extraordinary generation of men and women. I am consequently very grateful to those families who, understanding the importance of their loved ones’ testimony, added its riches to the public trove of stories.
My thanks are therefore also due to the staffs of the libraries who curate and manage the material and who have been so helpful to me during my researches. I’m particularly indebted to Peter Devitt of the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon, for his enthusiasm for the project and his many insights and observations, which illuminated what is a very large landscape. The Liddle Collection in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University was a rich source of new material and the team there made my life a lot easier with their professionalism and courtesy. The early period research owes a lot to Tim Pierce and the staff at the College Hall Library, Cranwell. Alina Nachescu and Cristina Neagu at the Portal Archive at Christ Church College, Oxford, were unfailingly helpful. Thanks too once again, to the staffs of the Imperial War Museum, the National Archives, the British Library and the London Library.
A big thank you too to old friends for encouragement, help and advice, notably Maurice Byrne in Dublin and Richard Foreman and John Nichol in the UK. Dr Robert Owen, the official historian of 617 Squadron, did me the huge service of reading the manuscript, criticizing and correcting to greatly beneficial effect. For those errors that remain, the fault is mine.
As always the HarperCollins team was a joy to work with. To Arabella Pike, Richard Collins, Iain Hunt, Julian Humphries and Helen Ellis, my sincere gratitude for your talent, good-natured professionalism and generosity in smoothing the way.