"For fans of Boys in the Boat and In the Garden of Beasts, the pulse-pounding story of how a Jewish race car driver and an American speed queen triumphed over Hitler's fearsome Silver Arrows on the eve of World War II"--

T.S.C. Cooke joined the RAF as war began in 1939, aged 18, and trained to be a bomber pilot. Rising to the rank of squadron leader and decorated three times, Cooke bombed Berlin on 7 October 1940 in a Whitley Mk V, nearly ditching in the North Sea. Throughout this tour he faced the usual dangers of wartime aircrew, his aircraft being hit by AA fire on several occasions, once almost having to order his aircrew to bail out but landed safely at the last...

Through the darkest days of the Second World War, an elite group of courageous, gifted women risked their lives as courier pilots, flying Lancaster Bombers, Spitfires and many other aircraft in hundreds of perilous missions across the country. The role of these women pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary was to deliver the planes to the male RAF pilots who would take them into battle, dangerous work which the women carried out unarmed, without radios....

With humble beginnings as an RAF apprentice, Johnny Wells progressed to pilot and rose to the higher echelons of command at the Air Ministry. From idyllic pre-war training, he would fly bombers against rebels over Iraq, combat Fw190s over England in the newly introduced and equally dangerous Typhoon, he would undertake hazardous low-level anti-shipping strikes in the English Channel, as well as train-busting sorties over occupied territory at night...

On December 25, 1943, the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst slipped out of Altenfjord in Norway to attack Arctic convoy JW55B which was carrying vital war supplies to the Soviet Union. But British naval intelligence knew of the Scharnhorst's mission before she sailed, and the vulnerable convoy was protected by a large Royal Naval force including the battleship Duke of York. In effect the Scharnhorst was sailing into a trap. One of the most compelling...

"...[a] narrative account of the top-secret U.S. mission to kill Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander who masterminded Pearl Harbor."--

1944. American bomber pilot, Jack Swaggart, has led his squadron countless times into hostile German territory, hit the assigned target, and returned to base none the worse for wear. Eventually, Jack's luck runs out. With his B-26 Marauder heavily damaged by flak, Jack is forced to ditch his crippled airplane in the German countryside. Separated from his crew, Jack trusts an unlikely ally, Hilde Augsburg, a plucky young woman, a decision with icy...

They came to fight for freedom and their country, they came to fight Germans. Men of the Polish Air Force, who had escaped first to France and then to Britain, to fly alongside the Royal Air Force just as Fighter Command faced its greatest challenge the Battle of Britain. Many of the Polish airmen joined existing RAF squadrons. The Poles also formed their own squadrons, but only four became operational during the Battle of Britain: Nos. 300 and 301,...

The 'little ships' of the Second World War - the fast and highly maneuverable motor torpedo boats and gunboats which fought in coastal waters all over the world - developed a special kind of naval warfare. With their daring nightly raids against an enemy's coastal shipping - and sometimes much larger warships - they acquired the buccaneering spirit of an earlier age. And never more so than in the close hand-to-hand battles which raged between opposing...

In June 1944 Allied troops were massing along the shores of southern England in readiness for the invasion of Hitler's Fortress Europe. Facing them, from the Pas de Calais to Brittany, were German troops, dug in, waiting and preparing for the inevitable confrontation. This compilation of in-depth accounts by German commanders presents D-Day, and the events leading up to it, from the point of view of the officers entrusted with preventing the Allied...