The Dam Busters, shown on BBC Television one Sunday afternoon recently, must be the perfect war film for people like myself who don't really approve of war, or of the military mystique of competitive valour and unquestioning obedience to authority, or of the exploitation of these things for purposes of entertainment, but nevertheless go weak at the knees at the image of a flakscarred Lancaster bomber coming in to land on a dandelion-strewn airfield at dawn somewhere in East Anglia in 1943.

LRB 21 October 1982 | PDF Download