Fighter Pilot

"The first and finest story of a fighter pilot in World War Two." Thus Group Captain Peter Townsend described Paul Richey s classic account of his part in the desperate battles over France in May of 1940. Fighter Pilot grew out of a journal which the then 23-year-old Flying Officer Richey began the day he landed his Hawker Hurricane on a grass airfield in France. Published in September 1941, it was the first such account of the war in the air and struck an immediate chord with a British public enthralled by the exploits of its young airmen. It is the story of how Richey and his No. 1 Squadron quite literally flew in the face of overwhelming odds and crushing fatigue to destroy 155 enemy aircraft, 114 of them in only 10 days. It is a moving account of one young man s initiation into the vagaries of war.