I think it’s disingenuous to use the ‘Boys series’ name here as it has a very different format.
The Lightning Boys (etc.) series tells first-person stressful and humorous stories that go into detail and really let you feel that you are there. But this Beaufighter Boys book is very distant and gives only superficial accounts of combat, at best. For instance, it covers one navigator who fought in four combat theaters but rarely covers any encounter with passion; it’s little more than a listing of the squadrons he served with and medals he earned. While impressive, I didn’t really get any feeling for what his time in the cockpit was like.
The author seems compelled to list all medals each aviator earned, which is impressive but when we know little about the encounters that earned these medals, they don’t mean as much as they should.
The narrator starts out like a computer-generated voice and clearly has no understanding of the material he is reading. He refers to a “zero point three zero three” machine gun… a what? Oh, you mean a three-oh-three? And encounters with the infamous Heinkel Three… the what? Oh good grief, you mean a Heinkel 111? No wonder he reads like a robot.
Overall, I’m disappointed that this book gave me only a superficial appreciation of what is was actually like to fly in these aircraft.