Their Finest Hours

TKE CITY THAT WOULD NOT DIE (280 pp.}--Richard Collier--Dutton ($4.50).

At 1:40 a.m. on May n, 1941, Police Constable Reginald Oakes was crawling in total darkness along a 12-ft. plank that linked two window ledges in London's bombed-out Alexandra Hotel. At one window, trapped in the ruin of their bedroom, were a shoe manufacturer named Davies, his wife and two panicky daughters. At the other, Constable John McKenning did his best to hold the plank steady; a concrete courtyard yawned 45 ft. below.

As Oakes inched toward the family, the gutted walls breathed ominous creaks, but that was only one of his worries; his pay was sure to be docked for a broken flashlight, he later recalled thinking, and his uniform was hopelessly soiled --that could mean explanations to . the sergeant. Snarling directions, Oakes guided the Davies family, one by one, to safety. "Never mind my name," he snapped. "If you've anything to say about me, I'm P.C. 369 B." Cockney Courage. What a grateful family had to say about its rescuer was glowing enough to provide Oakes--to his immense surprise--with Britain's coveted civilian award, the George Medal. Yet the constable's finest hour, as British Freelance Writer Collier makes clear in his meticulous chronicle of a Saturday night during London's blitz, was only one of many. Despite such selfless cockney courage, when the all-clear -blew, 1,436 Londoners were dead; another 1,800 clung to life in hospitals. Nearly 800 tons of high explosives and incendiaries dropped by 505 Luftwaffe bombers had tindered 2,200 fires, gutted 11,000 homes, chocked 8,000 streets from West Ham to Hammersmith with rubble.

One more week of heavy Luftwaffe bombing, Author Collier argues, and London might not have justified his book's ornately Churchillian title. The city had fumbled badly since the beginning of the blitz: fire-fighting brigades, their tough prewar ranks swollen by amateurs, were poorly coordinated, and water reserves were badly located. Worse, 35 weeks of bombardment had hardened London into taking business and pleasure as usual; on the night of the great raid, perhaps half the fire watchers were AWOL.

Why did the Luftwaffe fail to return the next night? What brought on this particularly savage sortie, the last and worst of the blitz? Collier can only make a guess. The night before, an insomnia-ridden Adolf Hitler had poked irritably at the log fire in his Bavarian mountain-lodge retreat; a captive audience of Nazi underlings yawned in their teacups. Then Hitler's secretary, Martin Bormann, and Pilot Hans Baur brought up the recent British raid on Berlin; was not some reprisal in order? Though every available aircraft was being readied for top-secret Operation Barbarossa (the attack on Russia), Hitler foolishly agreed.

Stiff Upper Lip Service. The genesis of the raid seems to be the only assumption in a book crammed with first-rate research; if anything, the spadework is a little too thorough. Collier's "the day that" formula has by now become wearily familiar. His dense, sludgy prose oozes little of the night's blood, sweat and tears, pays only stiff upper lip service to London's assorted heroes; most of them seem as anonymous as the dust that clogged their lungs.

But no writer could bungle May 10-11, 1941 completely, and Collier has pages of stirring authenticity. His sense of small drama is sure: pretty Marguerita Stahli, buried alive for 15 long minutes, fearful only that her fiance might have died during the blast (he did); the curiosity of the men in Fighter Command Operations Room as they plot the erratic flight up the North Sea coast of a lone Messerschmitt bearing Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess on his mad "peace mission" to King George VI. Such touches have the gritty reality of men at war.

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