Criticism not entirely crazy

Usage examples of flak.

Even a sneeze from a nervous gunner was enough to send a bomber into violent evasive aerobatics and like most pilots he feared mid-air collision more than flak and night fighters put together.

Flak, with the German cities merely playing the role of the unfortunate recipients of the bombs dropped by those bombers which had evaded the German defence.

He lunged forward over the bombsight to search downward through the plexiglass for some reassuring sign of Orr, who drew flak like a magnet and who had undoubtedly attracted the crack batteries of the whole Hermann Goering Division to Bologna overnight from wherever the hell they had been stationed the day before when Orr was still in Rome.

Bologna straight and level with my head in the bombsight and listen to all that flak pumping away all around me.

The other two losses fell to the Flak batteries of Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven when the bombers concerned strayed and flew near those strongly defended cities.

Staging Area Fagin was standing under a high arc light and watching his marshals suiting up Banish in a BDU, a battle dress uniform, black fatigues and a flak jacket and bullet-proof helmet.

We had the target buttoned up, and he was hedgehopping in that little kite, jinxing in the flak and taking quick squirts at foam.

That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddam cantilevered goldfish in some goddam cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddam foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire.

He took a number of photostats out of a large red expansion envelope he had been hiding conspicuously beneath a leather flight jacket painted garishly with pictures of airplanes flying through orange bursts of flak and with orderly rows of little bombs signifying fifty-five combat missions flown.

While he was wondering how he was going to get into Ford Island through the flak, and thinking that, if this were target practice, every safety precaution he knew was being violated, one of the Army planes he had noticed broke away from the others and swept down on him.

And the flak was just set up so they knew what line the airplanes would come to bomb that thing and the flak was just set to shoot at them.

We were sleeping with most of our kit on anyway, but it was a major embuggerance to have to pull on your boots, flak jacket, and helmet and leg it down to the slit trenches.

We were wearing nylon flak jackets on which each bloke had written his blood group.

And we had complete suprise, which was just as well, seeing as we lost about a fifth of our strength to their flak before we hit the ground.

At that moment, too, she heard off in the distance the low throbbing of planes, the muffled booming of explosions and the sharp staccato of quick-firing flak batteries.