Scholars Books & Nostalgic Picture Library

Antiquarian and Modern

Listed within my shop is a small proportion of what is held within this private business

A eclectic mixture of books. Listed below is a selection of what is available from a large collection of books, postcards, photographs and ephemera

Enquiries Welcome

AVIATION/PLANES/AIRCRAFT/MILITARY AIRCRAFT /WORLD WAR  ONE & TWO/INTEREST

DAMBUSTER

by

OTTAWAY

PUBLISHED ; LEO COOPER

FIRST EDITION 1994

 Few men have a better claim to be called a  legend in his own lifetime than Guy Gibson.  Leader of the famous Dambuster Raid of  May, 1943 which became part of the popular  folklore of the Second World War after the  film in which Richard Todd took the part of  the hero, he himself was tragically killed in  an air crash in 1944.  Born in India in 1918 and brought up in  England in comfortable if somewhat disjoint-  ed circumstances, Guy Gibson joined the  Royal Air Force in November, 1936.  Thereafter his career can be seen as a battle‘  between, on the one hand, his uncertain  temperament and less than ideal private life,  and, on the other, his undoubted skills as an  airman and as a leader of men. The war was  to bring him adventure and, later, fame. He  took part in the first aerial attack of the war,  on the Kiel Canal; he served in Fighter  Command and then, in 1943, came the  famous raid on the Mohne and Eder dams  for which he was awarded the VC. By now a  hero of international fame, he was sent on a  Public Relations tour of North America, but  basically he was a flyer and, refusing to  remain grounded, he died an airman’s death.  Susan Ottaway, who has had the full co-  operation of Gibson’s family in writing this  book, "gives a sympathetic but by no means  whitewashed picture of an unsettled character suddenly rocketed to fame and by no  means sure how to handle it.