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.