The Fly by Nights

At eighteen, Donald W. Feesey volunteered for RAF pilot training, only to be diverted into navigation when an eye problem ended his hopes of becoming a fighter pilot. Posted to Lancaster bombers, he completed thirty-four operational sorties during 1944 and 1945, most of them at night at the height of Bomber Command’s offensive against Germany. His memoir follows the navigator’s demanding work of plotting courses through darkness, weather, flak and enemy defences, while also recording the discipline and close dependence of an operational bomber crew.

Feesey writes most vividly about a sortie in which his Lancaster lost all power and the crew were ordered to bale out. Remaining aboard long enough to help the pilot, he discovered that one engine had been coaxed back into life, leaving the two men to nurse the crippled aircraft across the Channel and along the Kent coast to Manston. Around this extraordinary episode he describes training, NCO aircrew life, operational routine and wartime bureaucracy, giving a first-hand account of the mixture of skill, endurance and chance that governed survival in RAF Bomber Command.