HISTORY is offering you the chance to win a copy of Dambusters: A Landmark Oral History by Max Arthur, courtesy of Virgin Books.

‘Like almost any Briton, Australian or New Zealander, I had been brought up on Michael Anderson’s masterly 1954 film. I am one of those who cannot hear the Eric Coates’s ‘Dambusters March’ without tears pricking my eyes. The combination of imagination, engineering brilliance, obstinacy and determination that lay behind Barnes Wallis’s development of ‘Upkeep’, the bouncing bomb (which we now know was a bouncing and spinning bomb), together with the dedication, fortitude, daring, skill and bravery of the nineteen seven-man bombing crews who deployed that bomb makes for a story that will be told for all time. But it should be told right and Max Arthur knows how that is done’ Stephen Fry

On 16 May 1943, nineteen Lancaster bomber crews gathered in the dark at a remote RAF station in Lincolnshire for a mission of extraordinary daring and high risk – a night raid on three crucial dams deep in the heart of Germany. To have any chance of success in destroying the heavily defended dams, the raiders would have to fly across occupied Europe under heavy fire and then drop their bombs with extraordinary precision at a mere 60 feet above the water. The success of their mission has passed into legend.

Now those who were there share their first-hand accounts of the preparation, practice runs, planning, and the raid itself, including the sense of emptiness and loss when eight of the aircrafts failed to return.

With eyewitness testimony from RAF air and ground crew, and German civilians who saw and were affected by the raid, this landmark oral history is a moving and vivid account of one of the most famous bombing operations of all times.

To find out more about Dambusters and to purchase the book at a discount price, click here.