HISTORY
Buckham’s Bombers
Mark Baker
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Buckham’s Bombers recounts the service of Australian flight lieutenant Bruce Buckham and his crew, climaxing in the hunt for the German battleship Tirpitz. Mark Baker capably depicts the operational life of a man he knew personally and rightly admired, and conveys technical details in an easy to-read-manner. But the work is hampered by what appear to be a number of strange tangents, and research and editorial shortcomings.
Adolf Hitler launches the Tirpitz at Wilhelmshaven in April 1939.
Baker’s mix of sources appears good at first. Combining extensive memoir with archival research, secondary history and family interviews, Baker wisely allows whole pages for Buckham – possessing a precise and readable manner – to speak for himself. However, memoirs and recollections decades after the fact are notoriously fuzzy.
Dates and locations muddle, anecdotes from other sources sometimes creep in, “famous faces” become main characters, while new information and context can alter the very perception of their own experiences. Any author working with such material requires utmost care, and to treat it not as a ready-made narrative, but as scattered fragments to be carefully reconstructed.
Buckham’s Bombers recounts the hunt for the German battleship Tirpitz.
Baker recounts Buckham arriving in Bristol on March 13, 1943, to the sight of a German air raid. But there was no air raid on Bristol at any point that year. Another memoir is used to argue that “when World War II began, most young Australian men did not think twice about enlisting”. The outbreak of the First World War was marked by mass volunteerism, the Second World War was not. Despite population growth, only one in three volunteered in 1939 as compared with 1914.
These flaws are in the background as we arrive at the operational chapters. There, the work comes alive. The danger, the adrenaline, the camaraderie, the day-to-day and even technical detail that in less talented hands would be suffocating, make for riveting passages. Baker is held back only by Buckham being the sole crew member with recollections in bulk. But when the author does locate other accounts, such as during the attempt to destroy Tirpitz via Russian airfields, the reader is in for a treat.
However, in establishing Tirpitz as “the final boss”, we see the first serious signs of historical inaccuracy. We are told she was “the greatest battleship ever built”. This statement does not stand scrutiny, whether on displacement, weapon calibre, speed or service record. Still, the reading is enjoyable as we switch between air force life and politics, and various vivid operations.
It is during a retelling of “Operation Hurricane” that the historical narrative becomes questionable. On October 14, 1944, it is alleged Buckham and his crew diverted from a daylight raid on Duisburg to make a solo run on “a factory well over a mile long and half a mile wide” near Dortmund. Ordered not to descend below 18,000 feet, they drop a bomb that detonates inside the structure, leading to “an enormous shockwave … a mushroom cloud billowed to a height of about 12,000 feet”.