Sergeant Alek Pavlikov had hardly any flying hours under his belt but still felt ready to join in the fight against the Luftwaffe in the battle for supremacy of the skies above Kursk. His dreams of heroism were soon overtaken by a dawning realisation that a surprising number of his fellow rookies were dying on […]
To the pilots of Jim Ryan’s fighter squadron, Flight Lieutenant John Bright was the bloke who brought them supplies in his Dakota. He had a cushy number, while they were fighting off swarms of Japanese planes with their out-classed Brewster Buffaloes. Then Jim Ryan was posted away. The Squadron was dog-tired and depressed, battling against […]
They twisted and turned all over the sky, the two pilots trying to pull every trick in the book to be the one who drilled in the final killing burst. This was no ordinary dog-fight…for both aircraft carried the colours of the Royal Air Force. Something very odd was going on to have a Spitfire […]
The other pilots sneered and joked about it…the day of shame when they called Jim Black yellow. But Jim wasn’t laughing, and neither would any other pilot accused of cowardice and kicked out of the squadron. He’d just have to prove them wrong, even without an aircraft…
A veteran of the battle to defend Malta in 1942, Flight Lieutenant Jim Newman remembered barely surviving against Italian Macchi 200 aircraft. A couple of years later, when promoted to Squadron Leader in the Balkan Air Force – a multinational unit based in Yugoslavia and fighting the Luftwaffe – the Englishman was less than pleased […]
The huge stone statue of Buddha smiled… Beside it on this remote Burmese hillside lay the smoking wreckage of a Japanese transport plane, with an injured general inside, and a complete set of plans for their invasion of India. From every point of the compass Japanese search parties came to hunt for the wreck. And […]
They were trapped in neutral Spain – the pilot of a ditched Hurricane and the first mate of a merchant ship which had also become a casualty of war. They weren’t the best of mates, but they were all that stood between the British fleet at Gibraltar and a lethal strike force. The odds were […]
Purple with rage, the Luftwaffe squadron leader shook his fist at the lone Typhoon disappearing over the horizon. All around him, shattered planes and burning hangars covered his blitzed airfield, victims of one pilot. And on the airfield in Belgium a British squadron leader scanned the horizon for the same plane. He was furious too. […]
What makes a good fighter pilot? It’s mostly skill, and Charles Crombie had plenty of that. But it isn’t only skill – you also need to be able to fly through a hail of bullets and flak threatening to hack you out of the sky at any minute. And that was what Charles was afraid […]
He led his squadron into the thick of the fiercest dogfights – and yet he always came back without a scratch. He took fantastic risks, for he seemed to bear a charmed life. They called him “Lucky” Lane, but even his own men came to hate and fear the young Squadron Leader, because they knew […]
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