Angels Eight: Normandy Air War Diary

Because Allied air superiority was so awesome in Normandy, many believe the German Luftwaffe did not appear at all. How surprising to learn that the fierce battle in the skies over the Normandy beaches was much like the Battle of Britain -- both in duration, about 80 days long, and in severity, about 3,000 aircraft shot down. Only one or two books deal with the aerial battle over Normandy and those that do treat it from the viewpoint of one nation. For the first time, the squadron records of German, American and British units in the Normandy Campaign reveal details of nearly every aerial encounter that occurred, provide tabulation of the number of losses and yield the names of the pilots who fought.

But to get a feeling of what it was like to be there, this book also describes the day-to-day lives of the members of one RAF Commonwealth wing flying Spitfires from French soil. It quotes the words of the participants as recorded in squadron records, memories of veterans and in the pilots' combat reports. This is a book filled with factual detail written by one whose brother fought and died in the Normandy Air War.