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In Hornet's Sting Captain Woolley is fighting the air war of 1917, a grindingly slow battle of negligible land gain and stupendous human loss. The Royal Flying Corps strategy is to fly Deep Offensive Patrol low over enemy territory, slogging home against the prevailing wind. It proves to be a strategy so calamitous that a squadron could suffer 100 per cent losses in a month.
The story is savagely funny and vividly exciting - without ever losing its awareness of the squalid reality of war or the individual lives involved. The men of Hornet Squadron are a brilliant creation, perhaps the finest work of one of Britain's outstanding comic novelists.
