Alan Dawson is a fine historian, who has turned a labour of love -- a family history of wartime adventure and, ultimately, great loss, for which family archives only provide limited help in undoing decades of silent suffering by those who survived their sons and brothers -- into a brilliant piece of investigative story telling. At its heart are the adventures of Roy Lane, a Hurricane pilot whose determination to find excitement and serve his country took him from the skies above the British channel to the Atlantic convoys, to northern Russia and ultimately to the jungles of Burma. Roy Lane kept diaries, and promised his family that he would one day write a book about his war. But the diaries went missing, as he did, and all that the author of this volume, his niece's husband, had to go on were his letters home -- inevitably somewhat bland, to ensure that they were spared the censor's pen and reached home. But the comparative poverty of this material never gets in Dr Dawson's way. Thanks.. Read more
Mark Wormald

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Flypast - November 2024

"It is one of the very few accounts to have been written by one of ‘the many’ without whom ‘The Few’ could not have succeeded. The author joined up in late 1941 and was trained as an armourer, initially serving at a gunnery school. However, shortly before D-Day he joined a ‘Free French’ Spitfire squadron with which he served until the end of the war. The second half of this highly readable account is in effect a detailed history of the Free French Spitfire Wing during the last year of the war. That in itself is hugely welcome, but even more so is the description of the itinerant life of a 2nd Tactical Air Force fighter unit in the months after D-Day and the often-miserable conditions endured by the hardworking and ever faithful groundcrew. No less valuable is the earlier description of life for a working-class family in London during the inter-war years. A peach of a book that was unputdownable."
Andrew Thomas - Author and Historian

Rated 3 stars - Good.
Aeroplane - April 2024

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