The Fight For The Skies

Ref: 4796

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{detailed description}Flying fighters during World War Two may have seemed glamorous — the fighter pilot being a sort of twentieth-century knight —but it was also appallingly dangerous. More than 22,000 British and American fighter aircraft were lost during the conflict and over 9,000 pilots died.
The Fight for the Skies tells the true story of Allied fighter action during World War Two. More than 270 superb photographs have been carefully selected to show British and American fighter aircraft and their pilots.
In this balanced and unbiased account, the author dispels many of the myths that grew up, during and after the war, often fostered by wartime propaganda. RAF pilots in the Battle of Britain, for example, can now be seen as even more heroic in view of the weapons and performance superiority of the Luftwaffe fighters. And in the Western Desert, the British Hurricanes were at a great disadvantage until 1943. By the spring of 1944, however, the Allied fighter had become a truly offensive weapon, establishing air superiority over the enemy's home land.
This pictorial account covers all the Western and Mediterranean theatres of the war, concentrating on how and where the Allied fighters were deployed, their tactics and the men who flew them. All major fighter types are represented in the photographs, including Spitfires, Hurricanes, Gladiators, Tempests and Typhoons, Mustangs, P-38s, P-47s, P-5 I s, Whirlwinds and Meteors — as well as Beaufighters and Mosquitos. The activities of these very varied fighter types included escorting daylight bombing raids, fighter-bomber intruder operations into occupied Europe, and ground-attack activities in support of land forces in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and in North-Western Europe from the Normandy campaign onwards.
The author, Roger A. Freeman — well known to aviation readers for his series of books on the 'Mighty Eighth' — has researched each photograph to identify not only the specific aircraft types and models, but the pilots themselves, and he is often able to recount the backgrounds, careers and fates of individual fliers. He also keeps the reader informed about the qualities, in terms of performance, armament and overall effectiveness, of the aircraft relative to their opponents, and the changing balance of advantage in the air war above Western Europe and North Africa.
The Fight for the Skies provides an authoritative and engrossing panorama of one of the most important aspects of conflict during World War Two — that of the fighter pilots without whose victories the war could not have been won.
Roger A. Freeman is one of the leading authorities on US warplanes, the airmen who flew them and the World War Two operations in which they were involved. His books include The Mighty Eighth series and Raiding the Reich.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Roger A. Freeman
published by Arms and Armour Press 1998 1st edn. 192pp profusely illustrated 23x29
{condition}mint, d/j near fine
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