633 Squadron — Frederick E. Smith

633 SQUADRON GOES INTO ACTION IN "OPERATION RHINE MAIDEN”

After a near-suicide mission to the Swartfjord, which claimed many lives, morale among the survivors of 633 Squadron was at its lowest ebb. Unbearable tension and problems with replacement recruits were tearing the squadron apart...

The new Commander, Ian Moore -- young, brilliant and aggressive -- knew that the only thing that would pull it together was the challenge of another dangerous mission...

The Germans were developing “Rhine Maiden,” a new antiaircraft rocket which posed a deadly threat to the Allies' invasion plans. So the top brass decided that 633 Squadron should first bomb the rocket factory and then make a daring strike in broad daylight on an underground target buried deep in a Bavarian valley...

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.