Bloody Dangerous – Fifty Missions Over Germany: The Last first-hand Account from WW2 by Colin Bell

Flight-Lieutenant Colin Bell’s Bloody Dangerous is a powerful and inspiring portrait of bravery in action, full of touching admiration for his RAF comrades – one in three of whom were killed. He paints an extraordinarily vivid picture of what it was like to fly a Mosquito – the wooden wonder – in 50 raids over Germany, 13 of them to Berlin itself. There, coned by searchlights, he experienced the terror of being tracked by devastatingly effective 88 mm radar-controlled anti-aircraft guns when he wasn’t being chased by night-fighting Messchersmitt 262s – the only aircraft in the German armoury capable of outrunning the Mosquito. Bell suffered engine failures, fuel starvation, near fatal ice, numerous hits to his plane and, on one occasion, an explosion so close there was shrapnel in his parachute and burn marks on his navigator’s flying suit.

Bell takes us from pre-war London, where he wooed his girlfriend with tickets to see a new film opening in Leicester Square (it was Gone with the Wind), to terrifying scenes of the Blitz itself – he joined up after seeing a bomb fall on the other side of the street on which he was walking. As a member of the elite Pathfinder 608 squadron he was part of the force that, arguably, did more than any other bombing unit to bring about the Nazis’ final surrender.