Author Description

Includes the Aerial Warfare In Europe During World War II illustrations pack with over 200 maps, plans, and photos. When historians ultimately write of the Battle of Britain they must turn for firsthand accounts to the men who fought off the Nazi air onslaught upon the heart of the British Empire. If the pitifully small number of British fighter squadrons had faltered, the outcome of the entire war might have been decided for the tragic worse in 1941. Who were the pilots who carried this burden? What manner of young men were they? What were their day-by-day and hour-by-hour duties and motives and feelings? Wing-Commander Ian Gleed, a young man in his early twenties, was one of the tiny band of flyers upon whom the responsibility for turning back the airborne invasion fell. His story is only incidentally one of heroism; it is far more a simple narrative of duty assumed and done with youthful enthusiasm and unconscious idealism.