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

Review:

[Fighter Boys] portrays so intimately the lives, the experiences, the emotions and the fates of the pilots... A powerful yet restrained, at times almost unbearably touching, narrative. ("Evening Standard", London)

From the Back Cover:

A remarkable, intimate portrait of the young men of Fighter Command, whose skill, temperament and morale determined the fate of Britain and arguably the free world.

Drawing on extensive research and fresh source material in the form of diaries, letters and interviews with scores of surviving fighter pilots, Patrick Bishop's 'Fighter Boys' is a surging narrative of unprecedented power and insight. Reaching beyond the myths that have long surrounded this elite band, he brilliantly anatomises their personal qualities – their motivation, spirit and character – and gives us an astonishingly vivid sense of what it was to be a fighter pilot.

The young men of Fighter Command – most of them 19 or 20 – were shy heroes struggling to overcome the loss of their fellow pilots and the trauma of constant aerial combat. Cordial towards enemy fighters who had been captured and often uneasy after shooting them down – 'the unpleasant business of being an executioner' – they would borrow a car after a long day of combat and head to London night clubs, returning to camp for a few hours sleep before the next day's scramble. Their world and their ethos as it developed from the First World War onward was distinct from that of the other armed forces: more egalitarian with their comrades, they fought alone in their machines in conditions that demanded nothing less than extraordinary skill, courage and unsurpassed timing.

About this edition

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