This is the history of jet combat from World War Two to the Gulf War. It tells the story through individual accounts of real battles chosen to illustrate how the theoretical basis of aerial combat changed with the arrival of the jet and in the light of individual experience and technological development. It explains how what started as a dynamic race between Hitler’s scientists and the Allies became an indispensable part of modern warfare.

The book shows how the jet fighter and what it did, were refined in the Cold War to meet the requirements of deterrence based on technological superiority. It also shows how they were honed to perfection between the 1950s and 1980s, to perform as the warhorses of the ‘small wars’ in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, the Falklands and Afghanistan in particular.

This book is a detailed account of half a century of the fluctuations in the development of jet combat from guns to missiles, from maps to computers, from knights of the air to pinball wizards. It shows how the technical story and the human story intertwined to make the jet fighter one of the great icons of the second half of the twentieth century, and how their pilots became its heroes.

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