Fighter Pilots of World War 2

In this book Robert Jackson presents 14 aces from both camps of World War II, namely: Paddy Finucane, Frank Carey, "Johnie" Johnson, Pattle, Richard Stevens, George Beurling, Robert Johnson, Charles MacDonald, Adolf Galland, Erich Hartmann, Werner Molders, Jochen Marseille, Saburo Sakai and Ivan Kozhedub. The description of each ace's actions and biographical details are short but very interesting with an emphasis on their air combat experiences. The reader takes a nice overview of the most famous aces but if he wishes to learn more he hould look to other more detailed sources. The two more serious shortcomings of the book is the total absence of photographs and the very few notes about the aces' post-war career.

This book is a brief history of the flying career of some of the top pilots of World War II. Pilots from England, Canada, Australia, USA, Germany, Soviet Union, and Japan are represented in a very read-able text. I would place the reading level at the advanced high-school/early university grade, and is a very good source of information for those people out there who run flight simulators on their personal computers. I'm using this book as a reference for developing custom missions for the PC flight simulator "AirWarrior". There's enough combat detail to allow the reader to set altitude, location, number and type of aircraft involved, and the outcome.