Guarding The Skies

Without a first-rate Royal Air Force, Britain would arguably be a highly vulnerable international nobody.
Fifty years after the Second World War, in which the vital importance of the RAF in modern warfare became increasingly obvious, what role does the RAF now have in world affairs, and what are the men and women who work for the service like as professionals and as personalities?
In Guarding the Skies, Dennis Barker presents a candid, sympathetic and carefully researched study of life in the RAF today, focusing on the people who have tended to be neglected in more impersonal descriptions of today's high-tech force. Although severely depleted in numbers since the Second World War, the RAF continues to perform a crucial role in the defence of Britain itself, and the West, through its capacity to react flexibly to situations anywhere in the world at a speed impossible for other services to match.
Dennis Barker has talked to officers and airmen of bases as far afield as Hong Kong, the Falklands and Cyprus as well as looking at activities closer to home at air bases in West Germany and in the UK. He has seen for himself the relationship between the RAF and the United States Air Force, the rigorous selection process that faces candidates for the force and, above all, the qualities of the men and women who run the RAF in an age when increasingly sophisticated technology requires the highest degree of professionalism and skill both from pilots and from the far larger numbers of personnel working on the ground.
Dennis Barker has already secured a considerable reputation as the author of Soldiering On and Ruling the Waves. Now Guarding the Skies completes his 'The People of the Forces Trilogy'; it will be welcomed by all those who have enjoyed his previous books and is sure to win him many more admirers.


by Dennis Barker
Published by Viking 1989 1st edition. 383pp illustrated. 16x24 mint, including d/j.






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