Patrick Bishop has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is The Cooler King.
Air Force Blue
Summary
In a return to sweeping social history of wartime, Patrick Bishop - author of best-selling Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys - explores the lives and wartime experiences of thousands of men and women who served in all units of the air force, to mark the centenary of the RAF in 2018. On 1st April 2018, the Royal Air Force will be 100 years old - a short life by military standards but an extraordinarily important and eventful one. From the start it was special, standing sometimes awkwardly but always proudly a little apart from the existing services. It was a product of the modern age, whose fortunes depended on ever-more sophisticated machines and the right calibre of men to fly them and to keep them airborne. Its achievements between 1939 and 1945 - when it was Britain's last line of defence and the spearhead of its counterattack - were central to the entire war effort. During these years one in four of those in uniform wore air force blue, and the ethos of the RAF was indistinguishable from the spirit of the nation. Following his best-selling books Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys, Airforce Blue tells personal stories of those who served, using the letters, diaries and memoirs of the participants to create a true picture of what it was like to be a pilot, a navigator, a gunner, a fitter or a WAAF ops room clerk. It re-creates the reality of operations, whether wheeling over Kent in a Spitfire in 1940, rumbling towards the Ruhr in a Halifax in 1942 or looking down from the cockpit of a Liberator at the grey corrugated waters of the North Atlantic in 1943. It will also light up the humanity of the participants at every level - their values and motivations, their desires and ambitions. Air Force Blue is a substantial work of history, a monument to the wartime RAF as a whole and a must-buy for the descendants of the million-plus men and women from not just Britain but Canada, Australia and New Zealand who served.
©2017 Patrick Bishop (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
The Cooler King
Summary
The Cooler King tells the astonishing story of William Ash, an American flier, who after being shot down in his Spitfire over France in early 1942 spent the rest of the war striving to escape from every prisoner of war camp in which he was incarcerated. It is a saga full of high drama, climaxing in a break out via a tunnel dug in the latrines of the Oflag XXIB prison camp in Poland. Alongside William Ash is a cast of fascinating characters including Douglas Bader and Roger Bushell, who would go on to lead the Great Escape. Patrick Bishop vividly recreates the multiple escape attempts, while also analysing the passion that drove some prisoners to risk death in repeated bids for freedom.
©2015 Patrick Bishop (P)2016 Soundings
3 Para
Summary
In April 2006, the elite 3 Para battlegroup was dispatched to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. They were tasked with providing security to reconstruction efforts, a deployment it was hoped would pass off without a shot being fired. In fact, over the six months they were there, the 3 Para battle group saw near continuous combat, one gruelling battle after another, in what would become one of the most extraordinary campaigns ever fought by British troops. Around parched, dusty outposts reliant on a limited number of helicopters for food and ammunition re-supply, troops were subjected to relentless Taliban attacks, as well as energy-sapping 50 degree heat and Spartan conditions. At the end of the tour, the Taliban offensive aimed at driving the British and Afghan Government troops out of Helmand had been tactically defeated. But 3 Para paid a high price: 14 soldiers and one interpreter were killed, and 46 wounded. 3 Para tells the stories of the men and women who took part in this extraordinary and largely unreported saga. Best-selling author Patrick Bishop was given exclusive access to the soldiers whose tales of courage and endurance provide an unforgettable portrait of one of the world's finest and most fascinating fighting regiments, and a remarkable band of warriors. Their bravery was reflected in the array of gallantry medals that were bestowed on their return, including the Victoria Cross awarded to Corporal Bryan Budd and the George Cross won by Corporal Mark Wright, both of whom were killed winning their awards. 3 Para's saga of comradeship, courage, and fortitude is set to become a classic.
©2007 Patrick Bishop (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, London UK
Target Tirpitz
Summary
Target Tirpitz is gripping WW2 storytelling at its best and a return to the RAF territory of Patrick Bishop’s bestselling Bomber Boys and Fighter Boys. The Tirpitz, Hitler’s greatest weapon, was reputed to be unsinkable and the battleship inflamed an Allied obsession: to destroy her at any cost. More than thirty daring operations were launched against the 52,000 ton monster. Royal Navy midget submarines carried out an attack of extraordinary skill and courage against her when she lay deep in a Norwegian fjord in an operation that won VCs for two participants. No permanent damage was done and the Fleet Air Arm was forced to launch full scale attacks through the summer of 1944 to try and finish her off. But still the Tirpitz remained a significant threat to Allied operations. It was not until November 1944 that a brilliant operation by RAF Lancaster Bombers, under the command of one of Britain's greatest but least-known war heroes finally killed off Hitler’s last battleship. Full of colour, insight and drama, Target Tirpitz is an un-put-down-able account of one of the great epics of the Second World War.
©2012 Patrick Bishop (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
The Man Who Was Saturday
Summary
Soldier, spy, lawyer, politician - Airey Neave was assassinated in the House of Commons car park in 1979. Forty years after his death, Patrick Bishop’s lively, action-packed biography examines the life, heroic war and death of one of Britain’s most remarkable 20th-century figures. Airey Neave was one of the most extraordinary figures of his generation. Taken prisoner during WW2, he was the first British officer to escape from Colditz and, using the code name ‘Saturday’, became a key figure in the IS9 escape and evasion organisation which spirited hundreds of Allied airmen and soldiers out of Occupied Europe. A lawyer by training, he served the indictments on the Nazi leaders at the Nuremburg war trials. An ardent Cold War warrior, he was mixed up in several of the great spy scandals of the period. Most people might consider these achievements enough for a single career, but he went on to become the man who made Margaret Thatcher, mounting a brilliantly manipulative campaign in the 1975 Tory leadership to bring her to power. And yet his death is as fascinating as his remarkable life. On Friday, 30 March 1979, a bomb planted beneath his car exploded while he was driving up the ramp of the House of Commons underground car park, killing him instantly. The murder was claimed by the breakaway Irish Republican group the INLA. His killers have never been identified. Patrick Bishop’s new audiobook, published to mark the 40th anniversary of his death, is a lively and concise biography of this remarkable man. It answers the question of who killed him and why their identities have been hidden for so long and is written with the support of the Neave family.
©2018 Patrick Bishop (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers