Fighter Boys

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.Patrick Bishop, associate editor at the Daily Telegraph (London), is the originator of the television series The Irish Empire and the author of the highly acclaimed book The Provisional IRA. A foreign correspondent who covered the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, Bishop has also written books about the Falklands conflict and the Gulf War.