Fighter Aces

Fülszöveg

Fighter Ace! the words conjure up romantic images of dawn patrols, the 'Red Baron', the Spitfire, and the Battle of Britain. In this comprehensive history, Christopher Shores has gone behind the popular mythology surrounding the subject to examine in detail the careers of the most successful fighter pilots thrown up since the first great ace, Leutnant Max Immelmann, came to the fore on the Western Front in 1915.
He shows that despite the onward rush of twentieth-century technology, which has seen the biplanes of 1914-18, with their open cockpits and latticework of struts and wires, develop into the supersonic air-superiority aircraft of today, armed with air-to-air missiles, the basic ground rules of aerial combat have changed little since they were first formulated by the German ace of the First World War, Leutnant Oswald Boelcke.
Not only are the great aces of both World Wars here, men like von Richthofen, Nungesser, Pattle and Hartmann, but also the fighter pilots of the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Fighter Ace! the words conjure up romantic images of dawn patrols, the 'Red Baron', the Spitfire, and the Battle of Britain. In this comprehensive history, Christopher Shores has gone behind the popular mythology surrounding the subject to examine in detail the careers of the most successful fighter pilots thrown up since the first great ace, Leutnant Max Immelmann, came to the fore on the Western Front in 1915.
He shows that despite the onward rush of twentieth-century technology, which has seen the biplanes of 1914-18, with their open cockpits and latticework of struts and wires, develop into the supersonic air-superiority aircraft of today, armed with air-to-air missiles, the basic ground rules of aerial combat have changed little since they were first formulated by the German ace of the First World War, Leutnant Oswald Boelcke.
Not only are the great aces of both World Wars here, men like von Richthofen, Nungesser, Pattle and Hartmann, but also the fighter pilots of the inter-war years who fought in the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War, and the little-known but significant Nomonhan Incident of 1939, which saw large-scale aerial combat between Russia and Japan on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. Here, too, are the aces of the jet age: the top-scoring pilots of the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam; and the aces who emerged from the clashes between India and Pakistan, and the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars.
In addition to the wealth of black-and-white illustrations of the great aces and the aircraft they flew, twelve specially commissioned paintings record some of the most memorable combats in the story of the fighter ace. They include Werner Voss's last combat in his black Fokker Triplane in September 1917; Dick Bong, the great USAAF ace, in action over Guadalcanal in his P-38 Lightning in 1943; and a clash over North Vietnam between a USAF Thunderchief and a MiG-21 of the North Vietnamese Air Force. Vissza