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This is a continuing series about several squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in WWI and the Royal Air Force (RAF) in WWII. Beginning with three volumes telling the story of Goshawk Squadron in WWI, the story picks up again on the eve and early days of WWII. The first of these three is Piece of Cake, an excellent volume that appeared as a TV series on the PBS network some years ago (its available on DVD). It is the story of Hornet Squadron (Spitfires) and their part in the Battle of Britain, late summer and early fall, 1940. The volume under review is the second in the WWII series and, this time, is the story of a Bomber Command squadron of Blenheims. The last in the series is A Good Clean Fight.
Not only were these men who won the Battle of Britain while Britain stood alone in those fateful days heroes, they were humans as well, exhibiting all the characteristics thereof. These stories present an excellent behavioral cross section of a generation of men and women bearing the terrible burden of staving off the threat posed by the Nazi juggernaut. Derek Robinson knows what he's talking about and how to tell the story. Its a great series.

At this point I think I have the measure of Derek Robinson. Though I haven't yet read all of his books, I'm fairly certain that if I open the pages of any of them, I'm going to find the following:

1. Glib-tongued characters
2. Facetious dialogue
3. Black comedy
4. Farsical sub-plots
5. Romantic sub-plots
6. British cynicsm
7. Sacred cow massacres
8. Pitiless storytelling
9. Characters introduced almost to the end of the book, because
10. Characters are always getting killed off, and;
11. The RAF (and the British mind) as only an insider could write it.

DAMNED GOOD SHOW, the second of a loose three-book trilogy Robinson wrote that began with PIECE OF CAKE and ended with A GOOD CLEAN FIGHT, is not a great book. It is not a bad one either. It has all the Robinson trademarks I just mentioned; what makes it less impressive than some of his other works is the proportion of these elements to each other.

SHOW is about the awkward, clumsy, and painful origin of the Bomber Command's war against Nazi Germany - the slow evolutionary process of the RAF's bombing tactics and the frightful price they paid in lives and expense during the period 1939 - 1941 while they were learning the ropes of this new type of warfare. Robinson's books are always ensemble casts, and in this novel the ensemble includes two smoothly shallow bomber pilots, a ferocious Scottish explosives expert, several narrow-minded squadron leaders, a politician or two, a thrill-seeking young woman with a domineering and rich mother, a boy-girl documentary film crew and - serving as the continuity between the three books of the trilogy, the trouble-making Oxford don turned intelligence officer of PIECE OF CAKE, "Skull" Skelton.

As I mentioned before, this book contains all the classic Robinson elements. He has a peculiar ability to write without mercy or favoritism, so that the reader never knows who is "safe" and who is dead meat (for the record, nobody in a Robinson book is "safe".) He's very good at capturing the odd combination of immaturity and emotional shallowness that seems to typify flying men, and his dialogue, when it is "on", cracks with wit. He understands the mechanics of flying - not just the technical jargon, which he writes to a minimum, but the way pilots think and act and the way machines work - or don't work. And he is the most fearless man behind a typewriter out there when it comes to slaughtering the sacred cows of history - in PIECE OF CAKE and his nonfiction work INVASION he demolished the myth of the Battle of Britain. In A GOOD CLEAN FIGHT he ridiculed the idea of the Desert War as, well, a good clean fight. And in this book he shows the night bombing campaign for what it really was - a random massacre of German civilians by pilots who had no idea where their bombs were falling and could have cared less, carried out because the Brits had no other means to "carry the war to Germany."

The problems I had with it came largely from the fact that Robinson tried to tackle too much in too little space. This novel is fully as ambitious in its scope and the number of characters involved as anything he has ever attempted, but it is rather short in length, and all those people and sub-plots left me feeling dizzy and confused, particularly because Robinson is still introducing major characters in the book's last act. It is at its strongest when that walking thorn in the military's side, Skull Skellen, is annoying everyone senseless with his insistence on questioning the soundness of the operation or the believeability of the pilots, but Skull comes rather late to the book (transferred from Hornet Squadron) and aside from him and McHarg, there are few characters that really stand out in my mind. Robinson's gift for writing shallow characters well is unquestionable, but in the end there is only so much you can do with pilots who in terms of their personality and maturity are as like as peas in a pod. In the end, DAMNED GOOD SHOW is merely okay, but even an "okay" Robinson is still better than three quarters of the novelists out there.

A story of the RAF Bomber Command in the early days of World War 2. The fictional 409 Squadron starts out in Hampdens (which the Germans shoot down in droves on daylight bombing missions until they are scrapped) and then switch to Wellingtons for night ops, flying deep into Occupied Europe on a nightly basis to strike back at the enemy. They do it to let the Londoners in the Blitz know that Germany is suffering like they are, they do it to let America know they are still able to stand up to Nazi Germany and they do it to let Russia know they are not alone in fighting the Germans. All at a terrible cost in lives and aircraft. It takes awhile to develop effective night bombing techniques with many fatal lessons along the way. This is a book that is hard to put down but I thought was not nearly as good as Piece of Cake which has more characters developed in it with much better mess conversations. Robinson basically focuses his story on Silk, a bomber pilot, and throws in a Crown Films project of filming a night raid on Germany from start to finish to boost public morale which I thought detracted from rather than added to the story.
I would read this book first, then read Piece of Cake. Also, I thought Len Deighton wrote a better story of the heroic efforts of Bomber Command in his book entitled simply Bomber.