Late on the night of May 16, 1943, Wing Commander Guy Gibson led 617 Squadron of the Royal Air Force on a mission code-named Operation Chastise--an audacious bombing raid across the English Channel. Their aim? Destroy three dams in the Ruhr Valley, the industrial heartland of Germany. The dams were fiercely protected. Torpedo nets in the water ......
‘If we do not win the battle of training, we shall win no other battle in the air.’ In 1943 the Royal Air Force recognised that training a vast amount of aircrew for a high attrition war was essential to an Allied victory, and that the key to winning the ‘battle of training’ was the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS).
Fatal Mission is the story of Australian navigator Oscar Furniss, just one of 55,000 young men who perished while flying for Bomber Command during World War II. Lovingly crafted by his nephew, Mal Elliott, this book brings to life a young man whose name was never spoken by his family and who was a stranger to his modern-day descendants.