Ask Americans what the best fighter planes of World War Two were, and they will probably name the Japanese Zero, the German 109, and the British Spitfire. The Hurricane is just some other Brit plane. PIECE OF CAKE is one of my favorite WWII novels. It is about a year in the life of a British Hurricane fighter squadron, from September 1939 to September 1940. There is also a BBC Masterpiece Theater multi-disc DVD set, which is very faithful to the book. But I have to ding the video for changing the story so that the British pilots flew Spitfires instead of the Hurricanes in Derek Robinson's book. Historically, no Spitfires were ever sent to France, where about a third of the story takes place. Strangely, the video picture was superior on a set of VHS tapes I once rented, compared with the blurry DVD set I own, which is missing several scenes which were in the VHS tapes. (I've seen that issue before. My DVD of the movie EXECUTIVE SUITE is missing a key scene about 10-minutes long, which was on a VHS tape I rented.)Forgive me for being a technical spoilsport but there is a scene in both the book and the video where Flash, a pilot who is more than a little crazy, flies his plane inverted to "relax." A Hurricane could do this; a Spit couldn't. A Spitfire could not pull negative Gs or fly inverted because the engine would stop and then flood with gas, making it difficult to re-start. (This problem was not solved until about 1943, although there was a temporary fix for many Spitfires installed in 1941.) The upside-down flying scene took place in the book and the video in August of 1940. I have to ding the video for this; Robinson's book is technically accurate.In my opinion, the Hurricane's inferior reputation is undeserved. During the first half of World War Two, the English had twice as many operational Hurricanes flying as they had operational Spitfires flying. Hurricane aircraft shot down twice as many German planes as Spitfire aircraft shot Germans down, during those first years; meaning the two planes performed about the same in the air measured by KILLS per plane. Legless British ace Douglas Bader scored 11 of his 20 official kills from a Hurricane cockpit, the other 9 in Spitfires.At the start of WWII, the Hurricane had a wooden fixed-pitch propeller, and its performance was second-rate compared with the Spit; but by late-1939, early-1940 Hurricanes were fitted with metal variable-pitch props that made a BIG difference, and mostly closed the performance gap with the Spitfires. The Hurricane still wasn't as fast as a Spitfire, but it was more durable, easier to land, and had a tighter turning radius. The Hurricane still wasn't as nimble as a Spit, but it was a more stable gun platform so shots fired were more accurate in the air and more likely to hit the target. More important for England, a damaged Hurricane was easier to repair than a Spitfire. Heavily-damaged Hurricanes were often repaired and brought back into operational status; heavily-damaged Spitfires were usually written off because few mechanics could deal with the Spit's stressed-skin metal design.The witty dialogue and verbal exchanges between the pilots are beyond my personal skills as a writer. Spectacular. The characterizations and mix of characters, are again beyond me; I can only admire. Particularly impressive is how Robinson can explain aerial fighting tactics, not just through excellent descriptions during the action, but through the pilots arguing after the action.The novel really sings for me when CH3 is on the page. Christopher Hart, the 3rd, is an American pilot, a millionaire's son who flies for England partly to piss off his old man. Playful light-hearted boys start the war goofing off and having a blast in their flying machines. A year later, most of the original team are dead, and the few survivors are half-crazy, or half dead with exhaustion. Clearly illustrated in PIECE OF CAKE is how it isn't the airplane, it's the pilot. It's all about spotting the enemy before he spots you. It's about what the pilot does after he spots the enemy, how he maneuvers in for the kill; or lets it go because it's too risky. It's about how the pilot flies before he spots enemy planes (for example, an experienced pilot directed to climb to a high altitude on a vector away from the sun might disregard, and climb into the sun, then swing around, so he wasn't so vulnerable during the climb). "Sorry, leader. Your message garbled. Couldn't hear what you said."@hg47
One of my favourite books ever, and certainly one of my favourite novels about war. It directly influenced and inspired some of my own writing. Robinson's books can get a formulaic, but this book transcends all of that. It follows an RAF fighter squadron from September 1939 to September 1940, so while it all technically takes place during wartime a large proportion of that is the 'Phoney War' or 'Bore War' that took place until the German invasion of France in May 1940. Robinson's focus throughout the novel is on the human beings involved - how they think, how they act, how they are affected by the war and by each other. That is, if they survive at all. Robinson is very unsentimental about the characters, but never careless or callous about them. This attitude led to numerous protests and complaints from reactionary nationalist types when the book was published in the 1970s, who claimed that Robinson was disrespecting the memory of Our Brave Boys by portraying them as flawed human beings, as well as for the book's general thesis that the RAF was badly led and that the Battle of Britain didn't save Britain because there was no chance whatsoever of a successful (or even feasible) German invasion. Robinson takes great pleasure in breaking down the myths about the Battle of Britain and the conduct of the air war in general. He even gets in some blows at ideas of chivalrous WW1 air combat (although not to the same degree as in his books specifically about WW1).It is an overwhelmingly male book, although there are some good women characters in there who have no less agency than the men. The cast is pleasingly diverse otherwise, with an obvious predominance of British (mostly English) characters but with Poles, Czechs, and others coming into play as well. It deals with class issues, the contempt the pilot officers have for the sergeant-pilots and the enlisted ground crews, the privileged lifestyle afforded to the squadron due to their upper-crust squadron leader, and so on. Robinson paints a completely convincing picture of a fighter squadron and the stresses and strains of the war, as well as writing some really funny dialogues and situations as well. It runs the gamut of emotions and I truly think it's a crime that the book isn't as well known as the classic Novels About War like Catch-22. It's easily as good I think.Oh, the cover art is almost always Bad though. The only good one is the one with a crashed Hurricane on it and that's not in print any more. At least the edition currently in print is better than some of the others, it's not offensively bad just kind of inappropriate with its Big Action Scene cover art given that the book is very much not about that, even though it has its share of combat scenes.
What do You think about Piece Of Cake (1984)?
A gruelling but ultimately satisfying account of the lives - and deaths - of an RAF Fighter Command squadron in the first year of the Second World War. This is a bit of a slow burn, and rightly so, as the first half covers the "phoney war" up to the German attack on France and the Low Countries in May 1940. The boredom and frustration of this period does not wear well on the types of men who would make good fighter pilots and Mr Robinson's characters come across quite unsympathetically to the reader. However, once the real fighting starts in earnest, it becomes much easier to relate to them, not least because of the appalling casualty rate they suffer (hint to other readers, it's not a spoiler to say don't get too emotionally invested in any particular character - there's a very good chance they won't make it to the end).This, of course, is an accurate reflection of the realities of the time and place. I understand that when this novel was first published in the UK it got some bad press (mostly from the right-wing) for trying to puncture some of the myths of the Battle of Britain. Robinson gets much dark humour out of an RAF replete with absurdities such as issuing "Polish" phrasebooks that are actually in Swedish, an institutional inflexibility to adopt new tactics in the face of actual combat experience and the general "organized cock-ups" of the war effort. More seriously, he depicts the RAF greatly over-estimating the number of German planes they were destroying, which was indeed the case. He shows Fighter Command and its pilots stretched absolutely to breaking point, and then has one of his characters, an American journalist, point out that they're not even saving Britain from German invasion - that would be impossible while the Royal Navy still exists, an assessment few military historians would disagree with. It's another American character though, one of pilots, who retorts that that's not the point - the RAF has to win to show that the Luftwaffe can be beaten. And of course they did - the fact they did so because the German called off the attacks on Fighter Command's airfields just as Fighter Command was about to break under the strain, does not diminish the courage and sacrifice of the airmen one whit, and if there's a single thread shining through Mr Robinson's work, it's his respect for that.There are a few minor infelicities about this book. One which is out of the author's control is that, living as I do in the US, the ebook edition I have has had an editor rather clumsily replace some British English spellings and words with their American equivalents. Now I really do not have a problem with this in the narrative, but it really grates in the dialogue; other than the American pilot character "CH3", the idea of any RAF officer in 1940 saying"airplane" instead of "aeroplane" is simply wrong. In general, the characterization is fairly thin, even allowing for the short period many of the characters are with us, and only a few come to stand out. Nonetheless, this is a must-read for anyone interested in aviation or military history.
—Roy
This is easily one of my top 5 books as of late. It took me a while to get through, but every page was worth it. This tale that follows a squadron of RAF fighter pilots through the beginnings of WWII is sharp, clever, insightful, and quite touching. Robinson himself was a pilot and so the dialogue and details continually ring true. More than a story of war, it is a story of human beings, young men from all walks of life who find themselves in dire circumstances and manage to survive, or not, by their own slight of hand. I finished this book on an airplane, fittingly enough, and closed the cover and cried.
—Annie
Riveting for any amateur WWII historian. A factoid that remains with me after having read the book long ago is that the Polish aviators who flew with the RAF composed 6% of the RAF, but accounted for 12% of the kills during the Battle of Britain. Commonwealth RAF pilots did not want to fly with the Poles because every time they got within striking distance of the Luftwaffe, the Poles threw tactics to the wind, so to speak, and went for the German jugular.The Luftwaffe pilots reportedly avoided contact with Polish RAF pilots at all costs.Many, if not most of the Polish pilots had family and friends under Nazi rule back in Poland, had lost family and friends, and they wanted revenge.
—Tom Brennan
