Fighter Boys: The Battle of Britain, 1940 - Softcover

Bishop, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142004669 ISBN 13: 9780142004661

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2004

Synopsis

For 123 days in the summer of 1940, 3,000 youthful airmen in the Royal Air Force fought back against Hitler’s advancing forces with a  heroism that astonished the world. Drawing on interviews with scores of surviving pilots as well as diaries and letters never before seen, military historian and journalist Patrick Bishop re-creates with astonishing intimacy and clarity this excruciating, exhilarating war of nerves. In their own words, the pilots describe what it was like to bale out from a stricken plane, to go into battle in the face of overwhelming odds, to hear the screams of a comrade as he went down in flames. With a riveting, taut narrative, Fighter Boys relates how those young heroes changed the course of World War II—and the history of the modern world.

About this title

About the Author:

Patrick Bishop, associate editor at the Daily Telegraph (London), is the originator of the television series The Irish Empire and the author of the highly acclaimed book The Provisional IRA. A foreign correspondent who covered the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, Bishop has also written books about the Falklands conflict and the Gulf War.

From Booklist:

Taking a pilot's-eye view of the air battles over Britain in the summer of 1940, Bishop chronicles every conceivable aspect of the air-warrior's experience. Although the detail is fine-grained, resolving the Battle of Britain down to individual dogfights, Bishop competently and appealingly integrates the minutiae into a coherent narrative. Bishop sets the table with a discussion of the fighter plane and tactics as they evolved in World War I and their particular expression in the designs of the Hurricane and the Spitfire. Turning to the elite who flew those now-iconic planes, about 3,000 silk-scarved young men, Bishop serves the main course: their recollections, either published or, from the few still living, imparted to him in interviews, of the process of becoming pilots, from recruitment to training to combat. Well aware of how the subject has been romanticized, Bishop commendably evokes what it really was like to fly and die defending Britain from the Nazi menace. Gilbert Taylor
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0142004669
• ISBN 13: 9780142004661
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464