1000 Destroyed

Ref: 4720

SOLD In stock

Price: £26.00

sadly, flyingbooks is now closed.

{detailed description}This is a book about American fighter pilots in World War II—who they were, what they did, how they felt when they met Herman Goering's crack fighters high over Europe. Capt. Grover Hall, an Alabama newspaperman, was assigned to one of the 15 fighter groups of the 8th Air Force as Public Relations Officer. By the end of the war, his unit—the 4th Fighter Group—ranked at the top of the list with 1016 enemy aircraft destroyed. This is 261 more victories than were claimed by the entire U. S. Air Service in World War I.
This book, drawn from Capt. Hall's war diaries, first appeared in a limited edition in 1946. It sold out almost immediately. Over the years it has become one of the most sought-after of all aviation books, a collector's item for which enthusiasts have willingly paid many times the original price.
The 4th Fighter Group's first pilots came from the three original Eagle Squadrons, Royal Air Force units manned by American volunteers who flew in combat before Pearl Harbor. These were men like Chesley Peterson, who washed out of the pre-war Air Corps for "lack of inherent flying ability." Peterson's talents in an RAF Spitfire earned for him the British DFC and DSO and he became at the age of 23 the youngest Colonel in USAAF history. ,Don Gentile, another Air Corps reject, got into the fighting through the RAF. Before he was done he wore almost every American decoration, had 30 swastikas on his P-51 and heard General Eisenhower say, "You are a one-man air force!" Gentile's wingmate was John Godfrey who claimed 26 German planes, went home to Rhode Island for a breather, then came back to knock down 10 more.
There was Don Blakeslee, said to have flown more than 1,000 hours in combat, and George Green who landed his fighter in a pasture near Berlin to pick up a friend. And Kid Hofer, "Swede" Carlson, Steve Pissanos, "The Greek", Goody Goodson, Cowboy Megura, Deacon Hively, Mike Sobanski . . . young men who wrote a blazing chapter of air history across the perilous skies of Europe. This book is about these men.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Grover C. Hall Jr.
published by Putnam 1962 (of 1946 1st) 286pp illustrated, appendix. 15x23
{condition}very good in slightly chipped d/j.
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