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Author: Steve Brew
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781781551936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 990
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Book Description
41 Squadron is one of the oldest RAF squadrons in existence having celebrated its 95th anniversary in 2011. The unit has seen service from the First World War, the Middle East in the 1930s, throughout the Second World War, and more recently in the First Gulf War. The squadron's actions and reports are often revealed for the first time.
Author: Steve Brew
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781781551936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 990
Get Book Here
Book Description
41 Squadron is one of the oldest RAF squadrons in existence having celebrated its 95th anniversary in 2011. The unit has seen service from the First World War, the Middle East in the 1930s, throughout the Second World War, and more recently in the First Gulf War. The squadron's actions and reports are often revealed for the first time.
Author: Andrew White
Publisher: Fighting High Publishing
ISBN: 1838068767
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Donald Osborne Finlay, a sporting name familiar to households in the 1930s, was Britain’s greatest athlete of the time; a hurdler whose triumphant exploits graced the sports pages and newsreels week after week. From a humble family background, he became a double Olympic medalist, European Champion, and Empire (Commonwealth) Champion; he also won the AAA 120 yards hurdles an unprecedented seven times in succession. Reporters ran out of superlatives to describe him. At the three Olympic Games in which he ran, he captained the British team twice, including the Berlin Games of 1936 in front of Adolf Hitler. An all-round sportsman, both track and field events came naturally to him as did football. He played for the country’s top amateur sides and turned out for Tottenham Hotspur in wartime matches. All the more remarkable is that Finlay competed at the very highest levels of international athletics at the same time as pursuing his demanding career as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot. Joining up as a boy apprentice in the mid-1920s, he qualified as a pilot before the start of the Second World War and found himself in the cockpit of a Supermarine Spitfire, commanding a squadron, during the Battle of Britain. Shot down and wounded in the Battle, he was soon back in the air and rose through the ranks to command a fighter wing in Burma, ending the war with several ‘kills’ to his name, as well as a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Force Cross to add to the medals won under less lethal circumstances on the running track. As a commander, his insistence on strict discipline often led to conflict with his subordinates, but there is no doubt that his methods got results. After the war, still serving in the RAF, Don returned to competitive athletics and was as fast and successful, if not more so, than ever. By then he was in his 40s, but age was no barrier and several of his greatest hurdling victories came when others would have been long retired from the track, against athletes often twenty years his junior. Don Finlay’s life was to end prematurely, and under tragic circumstances, but his legacy lives on as one of the finest athletes ever to wear the vest of Great Britain, as well as one of ‘The Few’.
Author: John F. Wilkinson
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0997445106
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 127
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Book Description
The Lord Is My Shepherd is a factual account of the timeless story of a young man preparing for and engaging in the drama of mortal combat against a hostile force. It gives a penetrating look into 41 Squadron, a highly decorated fighting unit of the Royal Air Force.It captures the reality of air-to-air combat, the scars it leaves, the dangers these young men faced and the price they paid to serve their country. The story moves from the routine of rigorous training to the drama of aerial combat offering compelling insights as to the role of the Almighty in survival.Finely honed piloting skills and dedicated sense of purpose enabled 22 year-old Flight Lieutenant John Francis Wilkinson to shoot down or destroy a V-1 Buzz bomb and five German Focke-Wulf Fw190 fighters in the latter days of WWII. See the video ?John on the Hunt 1945? to watch gun camera aerial action views. You will find the story deeply inspiring in the accounts of how ?The hand of the Lord? provided for Flight Lieutenant John Wilkinson's survival as well as endless opportunities to observe the beauty of creation. John truly flew above the clouds and ?touched the face of God.' (From ?High Flight? by John Gillespie Magee Jr.)
Author: Mark Hillier
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 147384469X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Situated close to the South Coast, on flat land to the north of Chichester in West Sussex, lies Goodwood Aerodrome. This pleasant rural airfield was once home to squadrons of Hurricanes, Spitfires and later Typhoons. RAF Westhampnett was at the forefront of the Battle of Britain as a satellite to the Sector (or controlling) Station of RAF Tangmere, part of 11 Group, which bore the brunt of the struggle for Britain's survival in 1940. It became the base of Wing Commander Douglas Bader until he was shot down over France, as Fighter Command took the war to the enemy with operational sweeps over Occupied Europe. Those operations included the infamous Channel Dash which saw the escape of the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the Dieppe raid of 1942 which involved the largest aerial battle of the war up to that date. Westhampnett's squadrons also supported the D-Day landings and the subsequent Battle of Normandy. Packed with the largest collection of photographs of this airfield ever compiled, this illustrated publication provides a detailed history of the fighting as seen through the eyes of many of the pilots and ground crew. RAF Westhampnett brings to life those exciting but dangerous days of the Second World War through the words and photographs of those who were there.
Author: Keith McCloskey
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750994576
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
Conspiracy theories of sabotage, murder and even UFOs flourish around the greatest unsolved mysteries of aviation from the twentieth century. This account of the most intriguing loose ends from aeronautical history provides the known details of five great mysteries and the best (and most colourful) attempts to explain what might have happened. Planes disappearing out of the sky, shady dealings with Sri-Lankan businessmen, the plummeting death of the richest man in the world in 1928 and even the Kennedy family all feature in these gripping open cases. Having previously written about the Dyatlov Pass Incident and cast his detail-oriented eye over many other aviation mishaps, Keith McCloskey now turns his attention to reassessing these five mysteries –all of which occurred over water, none of them ever resolved.
Author: Anthony J. Moor
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1526753243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 569
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Book Description
“Inspiring history of the first designated night fighter base . . . an important piece of social and military history . . . a must-read!” —Books Monthly Anthony J. Moor’s exhaustively researched and highly illustrated book is the first to tell the full story of the part West Malling played in the defense of the United Kingdom, and how it served the RAF for twenty-eight action-packed years. Opened as a private landing ground after the First World War, the airfield at West Malling became home to the Maidstone School of Flying in 1930. The airfield’s RAF role came to the fore in June 1940; by then the station had been fitted with a concrete runway. The first aircraft arrived on 8 June 1940. As the UK’s first designated night fighter base, over the years that followed, RAF West Malling was home to many famous pilots—men such as John Cunningham, Peter Townsend, Bob Braham and even Guy Gibson, later of Dambusters fame. During the summer of 1944, Mosquitoes, Spitfires and Mustang Mk.3s successfully destroyed many V-1s, as well as played their part in the D-Day landings. West Malling’s strategic night fighter role continued into the Cold War, when No.500 (Kent’s Own) Squadron adopted it as its home in this period. A US Navy Facility Flight was also based at the airfield in the 1960s. After closure as an operational air station in 1969, West Malling re-acquired its civilian guise, hosting a Gliding School, Short Brothers and several major Great Warbirds Air Displays during the 1970s and 1980s, until eventually closing completely as an airfield, for re-development.
Author: Peter Jacobs
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1784383910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
This is the thrilling account of the last remaining Battle of Britain ace fighter pilot, Tom Ginger Neil. Neil was one of an elite band, nicknamed The Few by Winston Churchill, he flew Hurricanes during 141 combat missions in that battle and went on to command the first Spitfire XII squadron during 1942/43 as the RAF went on the offensive in north-west Europe.In this, the only full account of Neil's life to be published in collaboration with his family, we learn how he became a poster boy for the war effort and how he credits his sixth sense for keeping him alive during the Second World War.There was, however, one terrifyingly close brush with death, when in 1940 he had a mid-air collision with another Hurricane. With the rear section of his aircraft gone, the plane was out of control and hurtling to the ground, yet somehow he managed to bail out and miraculously survived with only a minor leg injury.As well as RAF service during the Siege of Malta, Wing Commander Neil, who is now in his late nineties, also served with the Americans during the D-Day landings.During his career, Neil was awarded two Distinguished Flying Crosses for the destruction of at least fourteen enemy aircraft, and was a successful test pilot after the war before commanding a jet fighter-reconnaissance squadron in Egypt's troubled Canal Zone during the 1950s for which he was awarded the Air Force Cross.With contributions from the man himself, this book also looks at his life after the RAF and his career as a successful author. For military buffs and novices alike, it is a must-read account of a true war hero.
Author: Geoffrey G. Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199604118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Blood, Sweat, and Toil is the first scholarly history of the British working class in the Second World War. It integrates social, political, and labour history, and reflects the most recent scholarship and debates on social class, gender, and the forging of identities. Geoffrey G. Field examines the war's impact on workers in the varied contexts of the family, military service, the workplace, local communities, and the nation. Previous studies of the Home Front have analysed the lives of civilians, but they have neglected the importance of social class in defining popular experience and its centrality in public attitudes, official policy, and the politics of the war years. Contrary to accounts that view the war as eroding class divisions and creating a new sense of social unity in Britain, Field argues that the 1940s was a crucial decade in which the deeply fragmented working class of the interwar decades was "remade," achieving new collective status, power, and solidarity. He criticizes recent revisionist scholarship that has downplayed the significance of class in British society. Extensively researched, using official documents, diaries and letters, the records of trade unions, and numerous other institutions, Blood, Sweat, and Toil traces the rapid growth of trade unionism, joint consultation, and strike actions in the war years. It also analyses the mobilization of women into factories and the uniformed services and the lives of men conscripted into the army, showing how these experiences shaped their social attitudes and aspirations. Using opinion polls and other evidence, Field traces the evolution of popular political attitudes from the evacuation of 1939 and the desperate months of late 1940 to the election of 1945, opposing recent claims that the electorate was indifferent or apathetic at the war's end but also eschewing blanket assumptions about popular radicalization. Labour was an active agent in fashioning itself as both a national progressive party and the representative of working-class interests in 1945; far from a mere passive beneficiary of anti-Tory feeling, it gave organizational form to the idealism and the demand for significant change that the war had generated.
Author: Steve Brew
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781781552964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 959
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Book Description
One of the oldest RAF squadrons, 41 Squadron celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2016. The unit has seen service from the First World War, through policing duties in the Middle East in the 1930s, throughout the Second World War, and more recently in the first Gulf War. Blood, Sweat and Courage completes the narrative of 41 Squadron's Second World War activity, concentrating on operations between September 1939 and July 1942. Author Steve Brew recounts the unit's role within battles, operations and larger strategies, and details experiences made by the pilots and ground crew participating in them. The squadron's actions are often revealed for the first time through records that have previously not been available. Brew evokes the feeling of the period, portraying not only a factual account, but also one that captures the color of life on a Second World War fighter squadron with a balance between material of a documentary nature and narrative action, intertwining fact with personal recollections, serious events with humor, and sobering statistics with poignant afterthought.
Author: Gregg Zoroya
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306824841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
The never-before-told story of one of the most decorated units in the war in Afghanistan and its fifteen-month ordeal that culminated in the 2008 Battle of Wanat, the war's deadliest A single company of US paratroopers--calling themselves the "Chosen Few"--arrived in eastern Afghanistan in late 2007 hoping to win the hearts and minds of the remote mountain people and extend the Afghan government's reach into this wilderness. Instead, they spent the next fifteen months in a desperate struggle, living under almost continuous attack, forced into a slow and grinding withdrawal, and always outnumbered by Taliban fighters descending on them from all sides. Month after month, rocket-propelled grenades, rockets, and machine-gun fire poured down on the isolated and exposed paratroopers as America's focus and military resources shifted to Iraq. Just weeks before the paratroopers were to go home, they faced their last--and toughest--fight. Near the village of Wanat in Nuristan province, an estimated three hundred enemy fighters surrounded about fifty of the Chosen Few and others defending a partially finished combat base. Nine died and more than two dozen were wounded that day in July 2008, making it arguably the bloodiest battle of the war in Afghanistan. The Chosen Few would return home tempered by war. Two among them would receive the Medal of Honor. All of them would be forever changed.
