Biblio Library

Born in London of an English father and Australian mother and educated in Switzerland, Billy Drake was to become one of the most illustrious RAF fighter pilots of World War II, ind ...

‘Where is the RAF?’ was the oft-quoted question asked by soldiers waiting on the beach at Dunkirk, to where they had retreated following the German blitzkrieg through northern Fran ...

When Canadian troops and British Commandos made their now famous ‘reconnaissance in force’ against the harbor town of Dieppe on 19th August 1942, they were supported and protected ...

It is 23rd December 1944 and a heroic yet dreadful action is about to take place over Cologne, involving the bravest of the brave – The Pathfinder Force. In the log book of one of ...

Night fighting in the air is a devious and clandestine form of mortal combat. In the blackness of night, success goes to the resolute hunter who stalks his prey unseen, and strike ...

The work of the RAF’s 100 Group remains one of the least known aspects of the 1939-45 war. Even less has been written about the specifics of day-to-day electronic warfare operation ...

Jimmy Sheddan was one of the many New Zealanders who joined the RNZAF, then left his native land to come to England to fight the enemies of Great Britain and her Empire during Worl ...

In his monumental work Bloody Shambles, Volume Two, Christopher Shores described in detail the British retreat out of Burma, culminating at the end of May 1942. The monsoon then br ...

Tony Blackman OBE, MA FRAeS was educated at Oundle School and Trinity College Cambridge, where he obtained an honors degree in Physics. He learnt to fly in the RAF, trained as a te ...

During the Battle of Britain, Geoffrey Page was shot down into the English Channel, causing him to suffer severe burns. This autobiography tells of his wartime exploits and the eff ...

This important work was first published in German in late 1939, no doubt timed to impress the young Luftwaffe fighter pilots who were embarking on the second major air war in histo ...

Low-level strikes against enemy shipping by torpedo-carrying aircraft were perhaps the most dangerous forms of air attack developed during WWII, and few isolated actions had such a ...

Gerald Stapleton was born in Durban, South Africa in 1920. In January 1939 he took up a short service commission in the RAF and eventually joined 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron i ...

Every day for nine months from September 1944 to the end of the war, young British, Commonwealth and Norwegian airmen flew from Banff aerodrome in northern Scotland in their Mosqui ...

Ted Stocker lived a charmed life. Trained at RAF Halton as one of Trenchard’s ‘Brats’, a posting to Boscombe Down saw him fly in both the prototype Stirling and Halifax just as wa ...

'If ever any one man won the Battle of Britain, he did. I don't believe it is realized how much that one man, with his leadership, his calm judgment and his skill, did to save not ...

Volume Two of this fascinating study of an airfield and its pilots starts just after the Battle of Britain when Hornchurch was at the forefront in taking the fight to the enemy, be ...

Established in 1917 to train Royal Flying Corps aircrew, during WWI Duxford was also the base for two United States Aero Squadrons, 137 and 159, and by the end was a mobilization a ...

Ten years ago Manuel Queiroz declared his intention to fly solo around the world. Having just beaten cancer, he was buoyed by the recent brush with mortality and ready to take on a ...

‘The Germans had watched our arrival on radar and that afternoon all Hell broke loose over the Maltese airfields. In spite of strenuous efforts by the fighters and antiaircraft gun ...

Originally built as an airliner that could carry passengers across the Atlantic for Deutsche Lufthansa, the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor developed into the Luftwaffe’s principal long-r ...

When Second World War Spitfire pilot John Gillespie Magee penned his poem 'High Flight', little did he know that his words would inspire legions of aspiring aviators who had a simi ...

Frank Dell’s experience as a Second World War pilot with the Royal Air Force’s Light Night Striking Force takes an even more dramatic turn when his Mosquito is shot down over Germa ...

Originally published in 1956, former Second World War prisoner-of-war Calton Younger’s No Flight from the Cage received critical acclaim. One critic wrote, ‘the book goes below the ...

Gordon Mellor served as a navigator with RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War, and ETA is the firsthand account of a conflict that tests not only his initiative and resil ...