Operation Crisis — Frederick E. Smith

It is late Summer 1944 and the Nazis have unveiled the first of their secret weapons. As V-1s packed with explosives drone high across the Channel and V-2s crash out of the skies on a defenseless Britain, the Allies wonder what other weapons might soon imperil their war effort.

A new threat is discovered by Ian Moore, the Squadron's charismatic leader, who has survived his crash in the Loire River but spent weeks in a German hospital where he has heard enemy crews boasting about a new weapon. Urgently needing to know more, London uses foreign partisans and the Squadron to free him. On Moore's return to England the Allies discover the danger is so great that it must be eliminated whatever the cost.

Created to perform such demanding one-off missions, 633 Squadron is given the task. But where is the weapon being developed? Davies, ruthless with his Squadron and his agents when a situation demands it, sends the courageous German girl, Anna Reinhardt, back into enemy-occupied Europe to find out.

What the weapon is and how it is destroyed in spite of its apparently impregnable location is told in this latest chronicle of 633 Squadron in which the author explores with his customary flair the characters, skills, and daring of the airmen he created in the first of these famous novels and has so successfully developed in the whole dazzling series.

Frederick E. Smith (1919-2012) joined the R.A.F. in 1939 as a wireless operator/air gunner and commenced service in early 1940, serving in Britain, Africa and finally the Far East. At the end of the war he married and worked for several years in South Africa before returning to England to fulfill his life-long ambition to write. Two years later, his first play was produced and his first novel published. Since then, he wrote over forty novels, about eighty short stories and two plays. Two novels, 633 Squadron and The Devil Doll, were made into films and one, A Killing for the Hawks, won the Mark Twain Literary Award.