Ops: Victory at All Costs

'Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.'J.G. Magee's celebrated poem of 1941 offers what could be taken as a somewhat over-romantic view of operational flying in the wartime RAF. From 1939 to 1945, of 125,000 men who volunteered for operations with Bomber Command, 55,573 were killed, the slaughter being at the almost unprecedented level of 41 per cent losses. The total British Empire and Commonwealth fatalities from 1939 to 1945 were 452,000.