The day-to-day insights of a brilliantly daring World War I ace that only ends with his death at the age of 23 . . . James McCudden was an outstanding British fighter ace of World War I, whose daring exploits earned him a tremendous reputation and, ultimately, an untimely end. Here, in this unique and gripping firsthand account, he brings to life some of aviation history’s most dramatic episodes in a memoir completed at the age of twenty-three, just days before his tragic death. During his time in France with the Royal Flying Corps from 1914 to 1918, McCudden rose from mechanic to pilot and flight commander. Following his first kill in September 1916, McCudden shot down a total of fifty-seven enemy planes, including a remarkable three in a single minute in January 1918. A dashing patrol leader, he combined courage, loyalty, and judgment, studying the habits and psychology of enemy pilots and stalking them with patience and tenacity. Written with modesty and frankness, yet acutely perceptive, Flying Fury is both a valuable insight into the world of early aviation and a powerful account of courage and survival above the mud and trenches of Flanders. Fighter ace James McCudden died in July 1918, after engine failure caused his plane to crash just four months before the end of World War I. His success as one of Britain’s deadliest pilots earned him the Victoria Cross.

World War II was the defining event of the twentieth century. For everyone it was a time of confusion, fear, destruction, and death on a scale never before seen. Much has been written of the generals, campaigns, and battles of the war, but it was young, ordinary American kids who held our freedom in their hands as they fought for liberty across the globe. Forgotten Heroes of World War II offers a personal understanding of what was demanded of these young heroes through the stories of rank-and-file individuals who served in the navy, marines, army, air corps, and merchant marine in all theaters of the war. Their tales are told without pretense or apology. At the time, each thought himself no different from those around him, for they were all young, scared, and miserable. They were the ordinary, the extraordinary—the forgotten.

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Chief Aviation Ordnanceman John W. Finn, though suffering multiple wounds, continued to man his machine gun against waves of Japanese aircraft attacking the Kaneohe Bay Naval Station during the infamous Pearl Harbor raid. Just over three years later, as World War II struggled into its final months, a B-29 radioman named Red Erwin lingered near death after suffering horrific burns to save his air crew in the skies off Japan. They were the first and last of thirty U.S. Navy, Army, and Marine Corps aviation personnel awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions against the Japanese during World War II. They included pilots and crewmen manning fighters and dive bombers and flying boats and bombers. One was a general. Another was a sergeant. Some shot down large numbers of enemy aircraft in aerial combat. Others sacrificed themselves for their friends or risked everything for complete strangers. Who were these now largely forgotten men? Where did they come from? What inspired them to rise “above and beyond”? What, if anything, made them different? Virtually all had one thing in common: they always wanted to fly. They came from a generation that revered the aces of World War I, like Eddie Rickenbacker, the civilian flyer Charles Lindbergh, and the lost aviator Amelia Earhart—and then they blazed their own trail during World War II.

Written and published prior (the Preface is dated September 24, 1918) to the end of the Great War (now known as World War I) the author describes the advent of aerial warfare and gives a contemporaneous account of those aviators engaged in the conflict.

During the Great War, books and stories for young men were frequently used as unofficial propaganda for recruitment and to sell the war to British youth as a moral crusade. Until now, this literature has been neglected by academics, but the image of the war these fictions created was remarkably enduring and, despite the appearance of post-war literature of disillusioned veterans, continued to shape the attitudes of the young well into the 1930s. This is the first detailed account of how adventure fiction represented the Great War for British boys between 1914 and the end of the war. Paris examines how such literature explained the causes of the war to boys and girls and how it encouraged young men to participate in the noble crusade on the Western Front and in other theaters. He explores the imagery of the trenches, the war in the air, and the nature of war in the Middle East and Africa. He also details the links between popular writers and the official literary propaganda campaign. The study concludes by looking at how these heroic images remained in print, enduring well into the inter-war years.

Now in softcover, the uniquely American story of the all-Black U.S. Army Air Corps unit in the segregated U.S. Army of World War II. Based at Tuskegee Air Base in Alabama, the 332nd Fighter Group flew their red-tailed P-40s and P-51s in North Africa and Europe. Despite their own casualties, these fighter-escorts never lost a bomber during the war -- in fact, bomber groups often requested the Tuskegee Airmen as escorts. First published as a hardcover (0-7603-0254-5), Tuskegee's Heroes is their story, told through first-person accounts, archival photos and the wonderful color paintings of Tuskegee airman Roy LaGrone.

Since the dawn of aerial combat in the First World War, the heroism of the men who put their lives at risk in the air has known no bounds. There were no more heroic airmen than the fighter pilots and bomber crews of the Second World War - men who sacrificed their own lives in order to save their crew or who, although in extreme pain, managed to get their aircraft home rather than risk becoming PoWs. In telling the stories of more than eighty such men, Heroes of the Skies paints a picture of aerial combat from the First World War right through to Afghanistan, and allows us to celebrate the extraordinary feats of our flying heroes.

Contains profiles, ranked in order of significance, of the world's most influential heroes of all time.