Alarmstart South completes Patrick Eriksson's Alarmstart trilogy on Second World War German fighter pilots, detailing their experiences in the Mediterranean theatre (1941-1944), and during the closing stages of the war over Normandy, Norway and Germany (1944-1945).
Alarmstart (scramble) charts the experiences of the German fighter pilots in the Second World War, based on extensive recollections of veterans as well as primary documents, diaries and flying log books, with photographs from the veterans themselves, many never previously published.
Duncan Menzies flew with the RAF, the Aeroplane and Armament Evaluation Establishment, and Fairey Aviation in a twenty-five-year flying career, seeing the world of flying change from open cockpits and few rules to the jet age, with its complexities and crowded skies.
Summer 1940, Britain is on the brink, fewer than 3,000 RAF fighter pilots stand between Hitler's Luftwaffe and air supremacy over the skies of southern England - the prerequisite for a German invasion.
This is a fighter pilot's memoir of four tumultuous years, 1938-1942, when he was first trained, then fought and survived in not one but two of the biggest aerial campaigns of the war, the Battle of Britain and the equally epic, but lesser known, Siege of Malta.
Volume 4 of We Were Eagles reaches the climax of the daylight bomber war which saw the Eighth Air Force B-17s and B-24s push back the boundaries and huge fleets of bombers penetrate further into the diminishing Reich.
Volume 3 of We Were Eagles covers the turning of the tide, when the air war was redirected to bombing communications targets in northern France in support of the 6 June D-Day invasion and the eventual breakout by Allied forces from the beachheads.
Wessex - for our purposes Dorset and Wiltshire, along with the western parts of Hampshire and Berkshire - has been part of Britain's aviation industry for over a hundred years.
What Manfred von Richthofen was to Germany, Albert Ball was to Great Britain: each, at the time, was the star turn of his country and Richthofen would describe Ball as 'by far the best English flying man'.
During the 1930s the need for a municipal aerodrome near Watford was debated at length, but it took almost a decade before the Air Ministry ultimately requisitioned the land at Leavesden for an aircraft factory.
Written by 43 Squadron's intelligence officer, Hector Bolitho, Finest of the Few is full of John's first-hand accounts of his combat missions against German Me 109s, Heinkel 111s and Dorniers.
Asked why he was in Britain, a US serviceman, fighting the war in the skies over Germany with the US 8th Air Force quipped, 'We're here to win the war for you'.
Geoffrey's memoir opens in May 1940, when he was eighteen years old and his grammar school in Kent was being evacuated to Staffordshire, away from the danger of German invasion.
"e;Interplanetary Outpost"e; follows the mission architecture template of NASA's plan for Human Outer Planet Exploration (HOPE), which envisions sending a crew to the moon Callisto to conduct exploration and sample return activities.
