Overview: Here are 17 true stories to stir the soul; tales of allied pilots and aircrew fighting against overwhelming odds. These true-life tales of air war are, in the majority of cases, based upon the first-person account given by the aircrew involved. No detail is left out and the reader is confronted with the protagonists’ constant proximity to sudden and awful death; the brutality of experiencing the violent obliteration of their friends; the feelings of desperation when, having jumped successfully from a doomed airplane, they then have to avoid capture or, having been taken prisoner, escape from under the noses of their captors, risking a fatal gunshot or execution. Ditching in the sea after an air battle, or simply having run out of fuel, brought new horrors as survivors, sodden and freezing in their dinghy, watched helplessly as their comrades edged over the brink of madness and walked off the dinghy into the depths of the sea.