of the famous Eighth Air Force consisted of its bombardment groups, each equipped withscores of heavily armed four-engine bombers. These Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses andConsolidated B-24 Liberators were soon punching through the enemy’s defenses to bombtargets vital to the war effort. They were crewed by thousands of young American airmen, mostof whom were volunteers. In short, Bingley and Peters detail how the 381 st crossed the Atlanticin May of 1943. Arriving at RAF Ridgewell on the Essex-Suffolk border, its airmen quickly foundthemselves thrown into the hazardous and attritional air battle raging in the skies over Europe.The 381 st ’s path led from its formation in the Texas desert to its 297 th and final bombing missiondeep into the heart of the Third Reich. Bingley and Peter offer a wonderful accounting of howthe 381 st contributed to the strategic bombing campaign of “The Mighty Eighth”.Meanwhile, told through the eyes of the Luftwaffe fighter and bomber crews themselves,“IN FURIOUS SKIES – Flying with Hitler’s Luftwaffe in the Second World War”, thanks to first-rate writer Tim Heath, explores previously unpublished first-hand accounts of the rise and fallof one of the most formidable air forces in twentieth, twentieth-first, century military history.Tim paints a harrowing, and haunting picture of the excitement, fear, romance, intertwinedwith the brutality, futility, wastefulness, and great tragedy for everyone involved.Within just nine years the once mightiest air force in the world had reached total collapse,destroyed in part by the very people responsible for creating it. By 1944, the Luftwaffe, weariedby aerial battles on multiple fronts combined with tactical mismanagement from the highestlevels of command, were unable to match their enemies in both production and manpower. Bythis time the Luftwaffe was fighting for its survival, and for the survival of Germany itself, above
the burning cities of the Reich, facing odds sometimes as high as ten-to-one in the air
