Compilation extracted from the autobiographies/books written by the pilots: 27 fighter pilots, from World War I to the Gulf, offer first hand accounts of the twentieth century's most furious air battles. Besides the explosive accounts of aerial combat, you'll find stories of capture and interrogation, of leaping out of flaming planes and recovering from wounds, and of searching for the desperate pleasures of R & R to help forget it all.
This work presents the 20th century's air battles in the words of those who fought them. Beginning with the jousts over the Western Front in 1914 up to the furious jet-driven sorties over Bosnia in 1999, these accounts give an experience of combat dogfights in the shell-blasted skies of war. It is about a form of combat that has changed beyond recognition. It gives details of the dauntingly high mortality rates among airmen, and insights into many other facets of a pilot's life from training to bailing out over enemy territory, what it was like to be interned and an account of being shot down in a blazing spitfire.