Squadrons Scramble!

Feel your pulse race and your heart pound as you follow the pilots of The Few running for their aircraft as the alarms sound and the enemy attack for a second time on a day of glory and death over the sunny skies of southern England. Then, beyond the Spitfire Summer of 1940, how the RAF’s pilots scrambled to defy the enemy over the battered ruins of Malta, the George Cross Island, or to defend Britain at night during the blacked out months of the Blitz. The prelude to D-Day, the disastrous raid on Dieppe was the scene of the RAF’s biggest air battle up to that point in the war, and Operation Overlord was shielded by the overwhelming aerial might of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. All these momentous events are told through the words of those pilots who fought in the unforgiving arena of the dogfight where a single moment can turn victory into defeat, life into certain death. Voices in Flight: Squadrons Scramble! goes beyond the air war in Europe into the baked plains and jungle-clad mountains of northeast India and Burma, where the enemy sported the Rising Sun instead of the Swastika and Hurricane fighters became Hurri-bombers. Every theatre is on show in this absorbing book, including Greece, the Mediterranean, and Russia, with an account from Hero of the Soviet Union Lieutenant Colonel Boris Safonov, who flew his Hurricane along with British pilots in the Arctic. Compiled by the renowned aviation historian Martin Bowman, this collection of wonderfully related stories of aerial combat, from a wide variety of pilots, some well-known, not only demonstrate the bravery and bravado of the knights of the air but also sheds light on the differing challenges of the campaigns fought as far afield as the North Sea and Singapore.