633 Squadron

✍ Scribed by Smith, Frederick E.

• Publisher: Thunderchild Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 160 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

They called it Vesuvius

It was the mission
on which D-day depended and it was given to 633 Squadron, the R.A.F.s crack
squadron at a time when every ounce of skill counted. They were top pilots who
flew with the recklessness of a passionate hatred for the enemy.

But although they
were fighting machines, they were also men. There was the Wing Commander,
tough, cynical, careless of his life but not of his crews; Gillibrand, the big,
brash flier who never knew when to stop; Bergman, the Norwegian resistance
fighter whose bravery was remarkable even when acts of courage were an everyday
event.

The planes roared
down the runway on that cold spring morning. And the men who had lived
together, trained together, played together, were off on a mission that could
change the course of the war.

"YOU HAVE
PERMISSION TO ABORT MISSION" The desperate message crackled over the R/T.
A dangerous mission had become suicidal. But as their planes screamed over the
black fjords of Norway, the men of 633 Squadron refused to turn back. Caught
between attacking German aircraft and the grim mountain walls, they plunged
straight on into a howling valley of death.

Adapted as a 1964
movie starring Cliff Robertson and George Chakiris, directed by Walter E.
Grauman.

Frederick E. Smith (1919-2012) joined the R.A.F. in 1939 as a wireless operator/air gunner and commenced service in early 1940, serving in Britain, Africa and finally the Far East. At the end of the war he married and worked for several years in South Africa before returning to England to fulfill his life-long ambition to write. Two years later, his first play was produced and his first novel published. Since then, he wrote over forty novels, about eighty short stories and two plays. Two novels, 633 SquadronandThe Devil Doll, were made into films and one,A Killing for the Hawks, won the Mark Twain Literary Award.