The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots: Eyewitness Accounts of Air Combat from the Red Baron to Today's Top Guns

by Lewis, Jon E.

• ISBN13: 9780786710669
• ISBN10: 0786710667
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

From yesteryear's flying aces to today's top guns, The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots presents, in the words of the combat pilots who fought them, fifty incredible air battles that have shaped military history in the twentieth century. Veteran anthologist Jon E. Lewis has assembled firsthand accounts from all the great military campaigns of aerial warfare, including World Wars I and II, the Spanish Civil War, Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, the Gulf, and Bosnia. Page after exciting page of this singular collection brings into vivid play the exploits of such legendary pilots as Manfred von Richtofen, Eddie Rickenbacker, Douglas Bader, and Johnnie Johnson; the Luftwaffe World War II aces Heinz Knoke, Gerd Barkhorn, and Johannes Steinhoff; and forty other brave airmen from America, Britain, France, Japan, Russia, and North Korea. Here, too, are the planes in which these pilots flew into modern historythe Spitfire, the Mustang, the Me 109, the Zero, the F-16, the MiG, and the Harrier. Together with the death-defying drama of combat, this volume vividly captures other facets of the fighter pilot's life, including the perils of bailing out in enemy territory, the daily horrors of internment in a Japanese POW camp, and a harrowing account of being shot down in a blazing Spitfire. The true-life aerial combat adventures in this stirring collection provide a vicarious, adrenaline-fueled expedition into the shell-blasted skies of war in the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments & Sources	ix
Introduction	xiii
The Wings Start to Grow	1	(36)
Duncan Grinnell-Milne
The Red air Fighter	37	(24)
Manfred von Richthofen
Blue Nose	61	(16)
William A. Bishop
Sagittarius Rising	77	(10)
Cecil Lewis
Letters Home	87	(4)
H. G. Downing
Flying Fury	91	(70)
James McCudden
Death Flies Faster	161	(26)
Ernst Udet
Crashes and Cocktails	187	(20)
John McGavock Grider
Prisoner of War	207	(6)
James Norman Hall
A Regular Dog-Fight and the Strafing of a Drachen	213	(20)
Eddie V. Rickenbacker
Action	233	(12)
Paul Richey
Battle of Britain Diary	245	(8)
D.H. Wissler
Finest Hour	253	(8)
John Beard
Tally Ho!	261	(20)
Roger Hall
Shall I Live for A Ghost?	281	(16)
Richard Hillary
Night Fighter	297	(24)
Roderick Chisholm
Dogsbody	321	(14)
James ``Johnnie'' Johnson
The Flying Tigers	335	(24)
Claire L. Chennault
To Kill a Man	359	(14)
Gunther Bloemertz
The Straits of Messina	373	(28)
Johannes Steinhoff
Baa Baa Black Sheep	401	(12)
``Pappy'' Boyington
Heavy Babies	413	(12)
Heinz Knoke
Mission to Regensburg	425	(8)
Beirne Lay
Flying High	433	(8)
Chuck Yeager
Marine Crusader	441	(8)
Bruce Martin
Night Mission on the Ho Chi Minh Trail	449	(8)
Mark E. Berent
Sea Harrier over the Falklands	457	(8)
Sharkey Ward
Interrogation	465	(10)
John Nichol
Appendix I: German War Birds	475	(12)
Anton H.G. Fokker
Appendix II: Dicta Boelcke	487	(2)
Appendix III: Fighter Aces of the World	489