Five wounded men walk out of an Army hospital and set off to reach their own units under their own steam. Happens all the time? Not likely, mate – especially when these men were deep inside enemy territory – even on the wrong side of the Mediterranean! So how could they hope to succeed?
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Captain Jimmy Ramsey and his maverick Special Raiding Force were used to doing their own thing – dangerous hit-and-run raids deep behind enemy lines. So, during the battle of El Alamein in autumn 1942, when the Raiders were teamed with a Long Range Desert Group unit to capture an isolated German airfield, tensions mounted between […]
In 1939, confident young Pilot Officer Duncan Marlow fell foul of an obnoxious C.O. and was posted out of the way to Griffin Island – a small garrison off Africa’s West Coast. Discipline was lax and the Governor was untrustworthy. He was on friendly terms with the Germans who were stationed nearby, even though War […]
Cairo – Egypt’s capital city and British General Headquarters in the Middle East, nerve centre of the Allied campaign in North Africa. A city filled with soldiers, sailors, airmen…but also a city teeming with spies and agents, men who would stop at nothing to get the information they needed…then send back to their own headquarters […]
“Unexploded bomb!” That dreaded cry would send shivers down the spine of the bravest man. Yet, for Lieutenant Bill Seddon of the Bomb Disposal Company, it was all in the line of duty. Every day he faced the task of defusing these devilish devices with the same outward coolness. But now the strain was beginning […]
Massive doors set in a cliff face. Enemy submarines slinking in at night to their hidden lair…and slinking out again before dawn to go about their deadly business. This base could not be bombed or shelled, but it had to be destroyed. And the man to do it was a soldier sent home from the […]
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