Åbo Akademis bibliotek

Every day for nine months from September 1944 to the end of the war, young British, Commonwealth and Norwegian airmen flew from Banff aerodrome in northern Scotland in their Mosqui ...

Ted Stocker lived a charmed life. Trained at RAF Halton as one of Trenchard’s ‘Brats’, a posting to Boscombe Down saw him fly in both the prototype Stirling and Halifax just as wa ...

'If ever any one man won the Battle of Britain, he did. I don't believe it is realized how much that one man, with his leadership, his calm judgment and his skill, did to save not ...

Volume Two of this fascinating study of an airfield and its pilots starts just after the Battle of Britain when Hornchurch was at the forefront in taking the fight to the enemy, be ...

Established in 1917 to train Royal Flying Corps aircrew, during WWI Duxford was also the base for two United States Aero Squadrons, 137 and 159, and by the end was a mobilization a ...

Ten years ago Manuel Queiroz declared his intention to fly solo around the world. Having just beaten cancer, he was buoyed by the recent brush with mortality and ready to take on a ...

‘The Germans had watched our arrival on radar and that afternoon all Hell broke loose over the Maltese airfields. In spite of strenuous efforts by the fighters and antiaircraft gun ...

Originally built as an airliner that could carry passengers across the Atlantic for Deutsche Lufthansa, the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor developed into the Luftwaffe’s principal long-r ...

When Second World War Spitfire pilot John Gillespie Magee penned his poem 'High Flight', little did he know that his words would inspire legions of aspiring aviators who had a simi ...

Frank Dell’s experience as a Second World War pilot with the Royal Air Force’s Light Night Striking Force takes an even more dramatic turn when his Mosquito is shot down over Germa ...

Originally published in 1956, former Second World War prisoner-of-war Calton Younger’s No Flight from the Cage received critical acclaim. One critic wrote, ‘the book goes below the ...

Gordon Mellor served as a navigator with RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War, and ETA is the firsthand account of a conflict that tests not only his initiative and resil ...

As a teenager ‘Tich’ Palliser became ‘hooked on this flying game’ and aspired to take to the skies. The Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve provided the opportunity and a few months ...

The Sturm Abteilung der NSDAP (SA, assault battalion of the Nazi party) – created in August 1920 – were squads of strong arms intended to protect the Nazis’ meetings, to provoke di ...

On the night of 5/6 June 1944, D-Day, a Lockheed Hudson dropped a small group of parachutists into the mountainous Morvan area of central France. Their mission was to operate as an ...

Considered to be the best known German bomber of the Second Wold War, the Heinkel He 111 served in every military front in the European theater, having first being deployed in the ...

The most iconic German aircraft of the Second World War, the Messerschmitt Bf 109 was the Luftwaffe’s principal fighter from 1939 until 1942 when the superior Focke-Wulf Fw 190 ca ...

Designed as a fast bomber that could outrun the fighters of the era, the twin-engine Junkers Ju 88 became one of the most versatile aircraft of the Second World War. Such was the s ...

Colditz Castle was one of the most famous Prisoner of War camps of the Second World War. It was there that the Germans interred their most troublesome or important prisoners. Hundr ...

Naval VCs have been won in places as far apart in time and distance as the Baltic in 1854 and Japan in 1945, in the trenches from the Crimea to the Western Front, in harbours from ...

In August 1909, a kindly, balding, figure named Mansfield Smith-Cumming was summoned to London by Admiral Alexander Bethell, Director of Naval Intelligence. He was to assume the in ...

The Luftwaffe over Germany tells the story of one of the longest and most intense air battles in history. The daylight air struggles over Germany during World War II involved thous ...

From jet planes and high altitude aircraft to radar-equipped fighters configured to deliver chemical weapons, numerous Luftwaffe planes were designed and reached prototype stage bu ...

This selection of accounts – written the men who did the flying and the fighting – lifts the lid on how the Luftwaffe operated and carried out its missions. Collected by the US Arm ...

The Special Operations Executive developed a vast network of agents across Occupied Europe which played a vital role in developing and sustaining Resistance movements that persiste ...