Air Force Combat in World War II, and the Personal Stories of Men at War
Air Force Combat in World War II, and the Personal Stories of Men at War
Air Force Combat in World War II, and the Personal Stories of Men at War
The Jagged Edge of Duty follows the life and service of a young Idaho school teacher during his aviation training and subsequent combat tour as a P-38 pilot in North Africa in the summer of 1943. A time when the Allied forces were preparing to break out of North Africa into Sicily, and when the still fearsome Luftwaffe was just beginning to buckle under the overwhelming Allied Air Power.
The arc of Lt. Knepper's wartime service is the story-in-microcosm of thousands of American combat pilots in World War II.
Jagged Edge describes the tactics and doctrines employed by the fighter groups at that time and place. it discusses the squadron and group leadership, the missions flown, the bombers escorted, and the successes and losses as they came. It deals in some detail with the lives of the pilots on base between sorties, with the multiple layers of stress they endured on the ground and in the air, and the results when that stress became unendurable.
It is an intimate account of one pilot at war - it is also the anatomy of the fighter pilot experience in World War II.
The Cold War Missions in the Words of the Man in Command
Air Force Combat in World War II, and the Personal Stories of Men at War
Air Force Combat in World War II, and the Personal Stories of Men at War
Spying from the Sky profiles the astonishing life and career of Col. William J. Gregory (USAF. Ret.).
The son of a loving but impoverished Tennessee sharecropping family, "Greg" found an unlikely pathway to college, and to aviation. His service as a combat pilot in North Africa in 1943 was first chronicled in The Jagged Edge of Duty. Like many pilots, his story did not end with the war. His love for flying, and his commitment to the nation's security, took him to the Strategic Air Command, to aerial tankers, thence to nuclear bomb-laden strategic bombers, and finally to America's Cold War high altitude program.
Greg stepped into the field of overhead intelligence at a time when the United States was virtually blind to Soviet capabilities and intentions. An intolerable situation for American leadership, given the terrifying new weaponry of the Cold War.
First with the Air Force, and later with the CIA, Greg commanded recon units that characterized the Soviet Union's armed forces, and blunted Soviet offensive initiatives in the Cuban Missile Crisis.