Air Forces & Warfare

In February 1945 the Allies obliterated Dresden, the 'Florence of the Elbe'. Explosive bombs weighing over 1,000 lbs fell every seven and a half seconds and an estimated 25,000 people were killed. Was Dresden a legitimate military target or was the bombing a last act of atavistic... mass murder in a war already won? From the history of the city to the attack itself, conveyed in a minute-by-minute account from the first of the flares to the flames reaching almost a mile high - the wind so searingly hot that the lungs of those in its path were instantly scorched - through the eerie period of reconstruction, here bestselling author Sinclair McKay creates a vast canvas and brings it alive with telling human detail. Along the way we encounter, for example, a Jewish woman who thought the English bombs had been sent from heaven, novelist Kurt Vonnegut who wrote that the smouldering landscape was like walking on the surface of the moon, and 15-year-old Winfried Bielb, who, having spent the evening ushering refugees, wanted to get home to his stamp collection. He was not to know that there was not enough time. Impeccably researched and deeply moving, McKay uses never-before-seen sources to relate the untold stories of civilians and vividly conveys the texture of life in a decimated city. Dresden is invoked as a byword for the illimitable cruelties of war, but with the ever-lengthening distance of time, it is now possible to approach this subject with a much clearer gaze, less occluded with the weight of prejudice in either direction, and with a keener interest in the sorts of lives that ordinary people lived and lost, or tried to rebuild. From general and individual morality in war to the raw, primal instinct for survival, through the seemingly unstoppable gravity of mass destruction and the manipulation of memory, this is a master historian at work. 'Extraordinary . . . a remarkably faithful account' Guardian on The Secret Life of Bletchley Park 'Painstakingly researched and f
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Incorporates many historic black and white and colour images of RAF, USAF, US Navy, USMC and overseas Phantoms. Offers a fresh approach to a much-studied type, presenting the reader with new and exciting images supplemented by informative captions.

Author was one of the UK s early aviation pioneers. As manager and chief instructor of the Bristol Flying School at Brooklands, he had many pupils who subsequently became famous

"This is the story of New Zealand's military aviation from its modest beginnings in 1914 to the formation of the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1936, the struggles of the Second World War and then the gyrations of the Cold War, wrapping up with the transition to the very differen...t post-Cold War world of the 1990s. It is a story of politics, of aircraft, and especially of people - of the everyday New Zealanders who fought the Second World War, who served with the RNZAF and the RAF, then and later; and who found strengths in themselves that, perhaps, they did not know they had"--Back cover.
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The fascinating and little-known story of New Zealand's daring military aviation pioneers.