Product Description

The thrilling story of the topscoring Allied fighter pilot of the 2nd World War `Johnnie' Johnson, who served with Fighter Command squadrons throughout the war, scoring his 38th and final victory in September 1944. From the moment the author joins his first operational Spitfire squadron in August 1940, the reader is taken on an epic journey through the great aerial fighter actions of the war including the Battle of Britain, sweeps across the Channel and over France, Dieppe and Normandy; and finally, operations across the Rhine and into Germany itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17686 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

Wing leader;Johnnie Johnson
For anyone with any interest in the air battles of the second world war, this book recounts the story of a legend. The reader is following the career of 'Johnnie'from his mid air engagements during the battle of Britain and ends with the wing leader soaring in the skies above the conquered third reich.This book has enough sobering detail of life in war but has a dash of the chivalrous 'Bigglesworth' excitement. It literally makes you feel as if you have used your fuel, spent your ammo, and limped home with battle damage.The book encapsulates all this atmosphere without exposing it to the risk of sounding artificial and innacurate or distasteful.A focker of a good read ,

Incredible
This is a marvellous book, that makes you feel like you could be in the cockpit, whilst at the same time, making you feel relief that you weren't.
The descriptions of the aerial battles, the flak, the missions, are all superbly done & you can only marvel at the courage & dedication of men like Johnson & feel eternally grateful that they were there.
A very well written account of the battle for the skies in World War 2, with some incredible testimony from (as the blurb on the book cover states) the top scoring Allied fighter pilot of the war.

Forget Biggles, read 'Johnnie' Johnson's true story.
A classic story of how the UK won the air war over Europe in WW2, written by one of the original Top Guns. Or is it?

I read this after having recently read Pierre Clostermann's The Big Show (Cassell Military Paperbacks), and over the last fifty years many other similar books including Paul Brickhill's excellent Reach for the Sky: Story of Douglas Bader, D.S.O., D.F.C. (Cassell Military Paperbacks).

Johnson's version of history is the golden gloss, written from the victor's point of view. It tends to skate over the hardship and exhaustion, terror and overwhelming odds, and how close Britain came to losing in so many ways; starvation, lack of man-power, lack of equipment, lack of almost everything except courage and the will to survive at all costs. He does mention how they had to rethink their tactics, and eventually adopted the Germans' well tried and practiced methods learnt in the Spanish war. Also he talks of how much he learned when flying with Douglas Bader, right up to when Bader disappeared from the sky.

He was lucky in that he missed much of the Battle of Britain when the majority of British fighter pilots were being shot down mainly because of their inexperience and inadequate tactics, in the same way as Clostermann escaped that particular carnage. He was also lucky in sticking with the evolving Spitfire; while Clostermann went on to fly a wide assortment of aircraft on different kinds of mission, some of which he survived only because he also had the Top Gun prescience. Both were frequently moved by their instincts, ahead of time, only to see bullets streaking through where they would otherwise have been.

If one reads both of Johnson's and Clostermann's books, then I think it is possible to gain a much better balanced view of how the second war was fought in the air. Each is rivetting in their own way: Johnson sailing over the problems is more reminiscent of Biggles; while Clostermann gives us the grime and warts, the fear and the death, and the politics and confusion. Both were flying before the war, both struggled to get into the action, both survived the war, each gained an incredible number of victories, but their two stories are so different, making two different sides of the same coin.

I think Clostermann's is the better history, based on his diaries and journals, better written, more realistic and with more background, but Johnson's is the more exciting and pacier to read.