Destruction at Dawn

Grant Dawson is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in military history at
Carleton University.

Operation Bodenplatte, Bishop’s subject, was a last-ditch German air
raid against the western Allies that took place on New Year’s morning
in 1945. A prolific amateur historian, Bishop has written widely and
well on military topics from a Canadian perspective. This book, which
retains his accessible writing style but is moved along by the personal
recollections of both Allied and German pilots, is thus something of a
departure for him.

The author sets the stage nicely in Chapter 1, with numerous small
sections describing what various figures on both sides of the line were
thinking and feeling on December 31, 1944. The entire book aims to
provide a “global” sense of the battle. At times that goal is
achieved, but both the personal nature of many of the sections and their
brevity make the book confusing, for they leave the reader with a
somewhat scattered, disconnected picture of what happened.

But Bishop, unlike some historians, knows how to tell a story. With the
exception of Chapter 2, an unsatisfying attempt to trace the Germans’
allegedly incompetent use of air power through the whole war up to the
raid, his book succeeds in providing a personal, vivid, and fast-moving
account of the ebb and flow of the battle. It takes us along with the
Luftwaffe Fighter Wings as they struggle to find and destroy Allied
airfields and aircraft, and with the Allied pilots, in many cases dazed
from the previous night’s revelries, who rose in defence.

The author’s main finding—that despite some successes, the
operation was disastrous for the Luftwaffe—is not new. The value of
his book resides in its telling of the stories behind those statistics
of aircraft losses.