Ace Pilots of World War II Series, Fighter Aces of the R.A.F 1939-1945

A Gripping Compilation of WWII Air War Heroes - the Famous and the Forgotten

De: E. C. R. Baker

Narrado por: Dennis Kleinman

Only a boy when World War II broke out, E. C. R. Baker was gripped by the stories he heard of heroism in the skies as the Allies defeated the mighty Luftwaffe.

But in the years after the war, he was struck by how few of the RAF's legendary fighter aces could be named by the general public.

Some, whose feats in deadly aerial combat equaled or even surpassed those of the most famous pilots, were virtually unknown.

Baker set out to make this right, devoting many years of research to collecting the personal life stories and combat details of the nearly 50 RAF fighter pilots who each shot down and destroyed more than 20 hostile aircraft.

Compiled with the help of surviving pilots and members of their squadrons, Fighter Aces of the RAF is a riveting and powerful book which combines meticulous historical accuracy with vivid descriptions, and brings some truly great men the recognition they so richly deserved.

©1962 E. C. R. Baker (P)2022 Tantor

Needs a better narrator

The prose is in a typical British 1950s -1960s style, dry and understated. So it needs a narrator with a bit more Vim. Instead, he drones on and the listener needs to really concentrate to keep track. A dogfight is described in the same tone as the internal working parts of a .303 machine gun. Also, the narrator, while having the ability to pronounce Croix de Guerre with an unerring pinpoint French accent, doesn’t seem to have bothered to look up even the most well known WW2 terminology and how it is pronounced. The famous German aircraft manufacturer Junkers is pronounced as if it were “junkyard”. The legendary Heinkel 111 is referred to as a Heinkel 3. Strafing is pronounced like “clapping” instead of correctly like “gaping”, even though the narrator seems to pronounce strafe correctly like “gape”. Sailor Malan is “Salem Alan”, etc. Overall it’s a rather grating experience and I’d avoid this narrator in future until he demonstrates an actual interest in what he’s reading.