Operation Diver – Guns, V1 Flying Bombs and Landscapes of Defence, 1944–45

Operation Diver was the codename for Anti-Aircraft Command’s attempt to defeat the V1 flying-bomb, the first of Nazi Germany’s “retribution” weapons, whose attacks dominated the home front in the final year of World War II. Beginning in the week of D-Day, the flying bomb battle lasted for nine months, as the men and women of AA Command became a massed, mobile army, shifting a vast carpet of guns to meet the V1’s changing lines of attack. Beginning in Kent and Sussex, their journey took in the Thames Estuary, East Anglia, and eventually the Yorkshire coast. After many technical and human obstacles were overcome, the battle to protect London was eventually won.

Published to mark the passage of seventy-five years since the flying bomb campaign, Operation Diver is the story of a battle: its action, people, landscapes, and remains.