A Forty Foot Mosquito With A Biscuit

I Know That Sounds Bizarre, But Bear With Me

After all, you're not paying for this, are you?  
     I refer, of course, to the De Havilland Mosquito aircraft, which weighed in at about seven tons, and which had a wingspan of 54 feet.  If you encounter insect mosquitoes with those dimensions, you are either; consuming illegal drugs; living in the hellish radioactive wastelands of AD 2361; or you are Ant Man.  Art?

Thus

     Now, I know the next thing you're going to go on about is the biscuit.  Well, this biscuit was entirely unedible, being made as it was of steel and high explosive.  It was a bomb that came in at 4,000 pounds, and for some unfathomable reason - RAF humour anyone? - it acquired the nickname of "cookie".  Art?

Brutish and British

     The Mosquito, stalwart that it was, could quite easily carry a two-ton bomb all the way from the Allotment of Eden to the Teuton High Temple (Berlin, that is) during the Second Unpleasantness.  Now, you know Perfidious Albion: all cricket-playing niceness on the surface, with all the manners of a rabid prop-forward underneath, so it was inevitable that someone put the two together, and so the Light Night Striking Force was born.
     An offshoot of the Pathfinder squadrons, the LNSF was used to mount dummy raids on widely separated targets across occupied Europe, drawing off Teuton nightfighters to try and deal with raids that didn't really exist.  They also executed what was nicknamed the "Milk Run", flying all the way to Berlin to drop cookies on it, sometimes twice a night.  A different crew would fly the same aircraft the second time, so the first crew could get some sleep, a luxury denied to the residents of Berlin.  Art?

Thus

     Herr Hitler, by now based in Berlin, also declared that he wouldn't go to sleep until the all-clear sirens had sounded, which meant the small hours of the morning.  Must have played havoc with his sleeping patterns, not to mention his decision-making capacity, especially that period when the LNSF hit Berlin 36 nights in succession.
     There is more to this story, but I don't want to overload a single post with aerial death and destruction.  For do we not have terrestrial death and destruction to deal with?!
     Okay, time to get the motley really drunk and then strap it into the centrifuge set for 6G!*

What the motley looks like
(Perhaps.  Opinions differ)

As Albert Einstein Said -

There is a great quote from "The Return Of Captain Invincible"**, except it's in German and I don't have either the original nor a translation to hand.  Which is not what I wanted to talk about.  How does it go?

"Each step is the inevitable consequence of the preceding one"

     Unless you're doing long jumps to get around, I suppose.  I think Art had better put in a picture to explain what I mean.  Art?

Mazes

     Note the absence of cheesy puns.  Those on the left are colour-coded, meaning you can only move from one colour to a specific other, and very challenging they were too.  I had to refer to the Answers page to complete them, as I simply couldn't manage unaided.  That more traditional one to starboard I got in about 90 seconds with a modicum of luck.  The track you can see is really drywipe pen on an acetate sheet, so the maze is not ruined for anyone coming afterwards.  How thoughtful am I!

Thus

Finally -
I have been reading a work called "Armed and Dangerous: A Writer's Guide to Weapons", by one Michael Newton, in between - er - breaks from work.*** There are a couple of points I'd debate, in particular his classifying of Perfidious Albion's primary light machine gun of the Second Unpleasantness being <Mister Hand redacts a 150 page screed for the sake of humanity> Czechoslovakian!

The rather stylish Czechoslovakian flag

     Where were we?  Oh yes.  Michael rather coyly notes that some hack writer had come up with a plot line whereby 100 atom bombs had been stolen, and the hero would recover exactly one bomb per book, leading to an immensely long publishing run and a tidy income for the author.  Sadly, it was not to be: the stolen atom bomb plot got wrapped up in four books and the whole series came to a screeching halt at Number 13.
     You know Conrad.  "What is this series?  What!  I must know!"
     Easier said than done.  Michael was careful not to mention the author, the hero nor the title of this series, and Google has been spectacularly unhelpful.
     If you know, there is the Comments section ...


*  This won't be pretty and we shall probably need sick-bags.
**  One of only two musicals that I like.
***  I can't concentrate with ferocious laser-like intensity all the time.