August 7, 1942, around a quarter to three in the afternoon. Sergeant Pilot Jimmy James was pacing up and down anxiously on the rough landing strip at Burg el Arab, some thirty-five miles west of Alexandria. The tented headquarters of the British Eighth Army and the RAF’s Desert Air Force, Burg el Arab was well within range of marauding enemy aircraft, and so normally whenever Jimmy landed his lumbering Bristol Bombay transport plane, he kept the engines running and flew off again as quickly as possible. Five minutes was all it usually took to unload the mail bags and supplies and load up any return post and wounded troops. Straight in and straight out again – that was the safest way. Read more…

I first came across David Crook when I was researching my Battle of Britain novel, The Burning Blue. I had picked up a copy of his memoir, Spitfire Pilot, in a second-hand book stall at Duxford and enjoyed it enormously. His is one of many personal accounts about the Battle of Britain that have been published over the past sixty years, but only a handful were actually written and published during the Second World War. Most famous of these (and still in print today) is Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy, which became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1942. Crook’s book also came out that year, and although it is now largely forgotten, I love it because of its obvious honesty and because it rattles along with a breathless immediacy that is lacking in so many post-war memoirs. Read more…

I was peripherally involved with the Merlins Over Malta team. Clive and Linda Denney run Vintage Fabrics in Essex, restoring vintage aircraft. A few years ago they went to Malta where a group of enthusiasts at the Malta Aviation Museum were impeccably restoring a Hawker Hurricane. It was Clive and Linda’s task to give the Hurricane it’s covering of doped Irish linen along the fuselage and to paint the aircraft to a very precise wartime colour scheme. Whilst there on Malta they began to learn about the part played by the RAF in the defence of the island during the war and with came the seed of an idea. No Hurricane had flown over the island since the war, and no Spitfire since the filming of The Malta Story in the 1950s. It occurred to them that it would amazing to bring these two legendary aircraft back to Malta, the scene of their biggest aerial battle other than the Battle of Britain. Read more…