Anthony James Cooper

As the son of a returned man, and born in the sixties, I took in the lore of World War II air combat with my mother's milk - or so it seemed. In those days Australia was thickly peopled with neighbours, uncles, fathers, grandfathers who had been in World War II; every newsagent was festooned with war comics, cheap paperback war novels, and non-fiction accounts of combat by air, land and sea in both World Wars. When my father took me to see 'The Battle of Britain' film in 1969 my life changed, my brain was refocussed, my imagination fired. I bought Adolf Galland's 'The First and the last' when I was about 12 - and read it! I loved Pierre Closterman's 'The big show' so much I stole it from the school library. My copy of Y.B. Yeates 'Winged victory' got so dog-eared by re-reading that I had to cover it in plastic to hold the cover together. I visited Annerley Municipal Library so often that I could have found P.G. Taylor's 'Sopwith Scout 7309' blindfolded. Luckily my mates at school were equally socially dysfunctional, and we wasted our youth playing wargames on weekends - mostly WW2 boardgames, but also tabletop Napoleonics. This ensured that none of us had girlfriends at that stage in our lives, leaving maximum time for our obsessive WW2-related hobbies. We passed books from hand to hand, and by the time I was 15 I was familiar with the legends of Douglas Bader, Guy Gibson, Leonard Cheshire, Paddy Finucane, Killer Caldwell, Billy Bishop, Albert Ball, and so many others (including Spike Milligan!). I can still identity the Mark number of any Spitfire and quote its performance figures from memory - all learned in my school years. My boyhood hobby of scale model building glued into my mind the aircraft and airmen of the past. The fact that I still build models makes it even worse - my shelves of my 'study' now groan with 100+ models in 1/72 and 1/48th scale. And then there are those others stored in boxes below the house for safekeeping, and all those unbuilt kits stashed away for my retirement! Of course the shelves on the other walls bulge from floor to ceiling with books. Whole shelves attest to the phases of my writing career - Zeppelins, Korea, Darwin, Spitfires, New Guinea, 5th Air Force, RAF Fighter Command, Bomber Command, Coastal Command. If my wife knew how much I have really spent on books she would demand a diamond ring as recompense!

After all this, I write because it's the logical outcome of a lifetime of thought, a noble obsession. I waited long enough for 'someone' to write a good book about the Spitfires over Darwin. No one did, so I gave up waiting and wrote it myself. No one wrote a comprehensive account of the Allied air defence of New Guinea, so I wrote that too. No one wrote an account of the Australian Spitfire pilots' fighting over France before the squadrons were sent back to Australia, so I wrote that one too. And no one wrote the story of the Australian bomber squadrons in England before the Lancaster era, so I wrote that as well. I focus on the first half of the war because that's when it was most difficult for us, when our men faced the greatest adversity, when the war hung in the balance, when things were most dramatic. That means I often have to write about defeats and failures and cock-ups. This probably harms book sales compared to more conventional, idealised accounts, but truth wins out in the long run.

The books, films and stories of my youth preconditioned me to the superiority of the Allies, of the Australians, of the RAF, of the Spitfire etc etc. I eventually got over all that. Luckily by the time I started writing I had read enough to recognise this kind of narrative for what it is - myth. Instead my books are all built upon the solid evidence provided by primary sources and other writers' research. To be respectful of the people of the past, we need to be honest, rather than merely upholding cheap fictions. So my stories are warts-and-all accounts of what really happens when the politicians run out of options and have to send young men into combat. In a big war like World War II, even successful operations are messy and nothing is really satisfactory - so the historical judgements we make are necessarily ambiguous. The evidence demanded that I lay aside my youthful hero worship and idealisation, turning instead to my sources in a tone of dispassionate analysis, moral seriousness and careful reflection.

Ultimately, my books memorialise the World War II generation by laying down a detailed, source-based combat narrative of key campaigns in which those men participated. The airmen are always at the centre of my stories. I take pains to describe in as much detail as possible how they flew and fought, the problems and situations they faced, and how they died or survived. As I say in 'RAAF bombers', my books are an elegy to the men of that time.