Author Description

The genesis of this book is probably the most diverse and complex of any I have attempted to write. I will try to explain it before you delve any deeper. My academic background is an historian. Indeed, my first degree is in History and Problems of Historical Evidence. Within those loose confines I listened intently to the stories my parents told of growing up near London during the Blitz of World War 2. But it was one of my dad's stories which really impacted while I was drafting this book. My late father was a young chorister at the church of St Mary the Virgin in Farnham Royal in Slough - some 23 miles from the centre of London. The nearby Britwell trading estate was a focus of German bombing during World War 2. Dad remembered the High Duty Alloys (HDA) factory at Britwell, which was near to The Artel Works factory making precision instruments for the Mosquito bombers, being hit in July 1940. He witnessed the funerals of those who perished at the church where he was a chorister. But for many years the high impact bomb on the HDA factory remained a "mystery of World War 2". Recent research has concluded that the bomb may have been dropped by mistake by an RAF Bristol Blenheim bomber returning from a failed mission over Germany. But the bigger shock for my father came in October 1940 when German bombs exploded on land adjacent to the church. Dad and his young friends were traumatized when attending church for choir practice to find body parts from the graves of the recently interred scattered across the churchyard. This memory resonated recently while I was watching the brilliant 2021 movie The Shadow in my Eye - aka The Bombardment - on Netflix. It is a Danish war drama written and directed by Ole Bornedal tells the heart-wrenching true story of Operation Carthage, the 1945 British air raid on Nazi-occupied Copenhagen that went horribly wrong. The Nazis occupied Denmark. With their numbers dwindling