One of the earliest books we worked on was The Other Few which detailed the operations carried out by Bomber and Coastal Command crews during the Battle of Britain. The author Larry Donnelly had been a wireless operator on Whitleys and put us in touch with several other ex-Whitley veterans to record their stories. Their accounts of going to war in a Whitley during the early part of World War Two were quite simply, extraordinary. Not only were they flying in an already semi-obsolete aircraft, but they also had to do it at night, with no real navigation aids and in weather that often they couldnt climb out of. And often it was just to drop a ton of leaflets! Despite this, they all looked back on the Whitley with affection, an old friend that did its best and brought them home despite the challenges.
It is with this affection in mind that weve set out this book. The Whitley was one of those unfortunate mid-1930s aircraft that went from state-of-the-art to obsolete within just a few years. Effectively it replaced the Heyford biplane but was itself replaced by the Lancaster just a few years later.
Weve written this one as a team, each one of us digging deep into the Whitleys background and discovering lots of things we never knew.
One good thing about these new bombers in the late 1930s is that they were very popular in the Press, so we had a multitude of high quality Press photos to choose from. These, combined with some rare personal photos taken by the crews themselves, have created a very worthy tribute and reference book to the good old Whitley, we hope Larry and his friends would have approved.
