Goshawk Squadron.

London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1971. Octavo, blue boards (hardcover), gilt letters, [218] pp. Near-Fine, with bookplate; in a Fine, mylar protected dust jacket. From dust jacket: Goshawk Squadron, R. F. C., January 1918. The C. O., Woolley, indoctrinates his pilots with a simple yet savage code: shoot the enemy in the back before he knows you’re there -- a brisk cold blooded approach to the business of air warfare and far removed from the romance of ‘chivalry in the clouds.’ Even so, he believes in three months the whole squadron will be dead. Scruffy and a perpetual Guinness-drinker, he trains his flyers with a measured mixture of sarcasm and brutality. Planes fly, crash, are patched with canvas, lubricated with castor oil, and fly again. ‘We eat death for bloody breakfast,’ Woolley says, ‘It’s what keeps us going.’ Surprisingly this first novel set in the last year of a catastrophic war is not only shocking and exciting but a very funny book. Woolley may drive his men but he terrorizes the top brass; and with his grilfriend Margery he is something else again,. Derek Robinson’s portrait of this wild old man of twenty-three is an extra-ordinary success.