Loosely based on Len Deighton's book?

Watched the movie, saw your comment, went back and read the book. Maybe now the movie again? Len Deighton's "Bomber" is an extremely long, detailed, broad-ranging story of a British Bomber Command night bombing raid on the Ruhr industrial district in late 1943.

It is a remarkable book in its level of detail, analysis, and diverse characters / points of view. The target pathfinders, under heavy air and artillery fire, marked the wrong location with their flares - a small town named Altgarten. The 700-plus planes of the 'bomber stream' then laid thousands of bombs - HE, incendiaries, blockbusters and delayed-fuses - across the village.

Some planes (a handful) made it to the proper target. Some of them jettisoned their bombs in the general area, due to poor navigation, flak or night-fighter damage, etc. Many were shot down 'off target.'

But in this film 'Bomber' the raid itself is described so thinly, off-handedly, that it has no real connection at all to the book. Yes, they badly missed their target - furniture shop or dairy farm, as was revealed. But there was no sense of the fictional Deighton strike's real mission, its extreme difficulties, nor the horror of the inferno of little Altgarten.

So yes, Len Deighton's book may well have planted a seed of this story of the remorseful elderly bomber crewman - whose actions in error were relatively quite minor. But the German townspeople in the film's village had moved on from that event, long long ago, and the error seemed most inconsequential to them, on being reminded of it.

BOTH the book and the movie are valuable lessons on fading history - one is simply terrifying and tragic, one is at first tense (the payback?, then anticlimactic, and then quite moving.