Fighter Boys: The Battle of Britain, 1940 - Hardcover

Bishop, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670032301 ISBN 13: 9780670032303

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2003

Synopsis

Traces the 1940 defense campaign of Britain by its young RAF airmen, drawing on survivor interviews, diaries, and letters to describe their combat experiences and their victory against Luftwaffe fighters. 25,000 first printing.

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: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670032301
• ISBN 13: 9780670032303
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448