rms10 | Blackout! Who wants to talk about Blackout?

I just finished Blackout, by Connie Willis, with perfect timing -- All Clear comes out on Tuesday. (If that's not a reason to finally get a library card here, I don't know what is.) And oh boy, I need to talk about Blackout. Surely some of you have read it?

Since I am still all "EEEEEEE!" about it, let's go straight to bullet points. I probably need to re-read the first half of the book to figure out what is going on.

No one writes chaos and misunderstandings like Connie Willis. It's actually not a plot device I like, but she does it well enough that I genuinely find it more tense than annoying.
I was so worried that Polly, Eileen, and Mike would be the three casualties at Padgett's.
Have any of them changed history?
Okay, I have tried to accept the lack of cell phones in mid-21st century Oxford. It's actually a bit less annoying in this than in Doomsday Book. But I can't believe they're just sending historians willy-nilly into World War II. They all seemed unprepared for any loop thrown at them in their missions.
I'm not sure that we knew that there were "deadlines" in this time travel universe, and couldn't be in the same temporal location in two different places. But that makes sense, so I like that as a plot point. However, see above as to the carelessness of the History department.
And all that said -- is Dunworthy in London???? Was he killed in the raid? Is that why no one in Oxford can find Dunworthy?
Why aren't the drops working?

I'm sure that, like, half of my questions are answered in the first half of the book. Still, have any of you read it? What do you think?