Squadrons Up! A Firsthand Story of the R.A.F.
- New York: Whittlesey House, 1941
New York: Whittlesey House, 1941. First American Edition. First Printing. Octavo (21cm); red cloth, with titles stamped in black on spine; dark red topstain; dustjacket; x,[2],3-260,[2]pp, with portrait frontispiece of the author. Pictorial bookplate of noted poet, translator, and anthropologist Nathaniel Tarn (1928-2024) mounted on front pastedown. Spine ends very gently nudged, else a clean, Near Fine. In the original pictorial dustjacket, designed by E. McKnight Kauffer; unclipped (priced $2.50), edgeworn, gently spine-sunned and a bit dust-soiled, with several nicks, tears, and attendant creases, and eight small clear tape mends on verso; Very Good.
Monks was a Daily Mail journalist embedded in France with the RAF in the early days prceding the Battle of Britain, and was close friends with a number of the men who fought the seemingly inexhaustible waves of Luftwaffe seeking to subjugate Europe under fascism. His central point is one that is often overlooked in stirring accounts of Spitfires and Hurricanes scrambling across the skies of Europe; no man had, previous to the early days of WW2, fought another man at 30,000 feet in an "orange crate" made out of aluminium and canvas, screaming across the sky at 350mph, firing 9600 rounds per minute. Everything we now know about being a fighter pilot had to be developed from the ground up by these men; additionally it had to be conceived by men whose average age was 22, and upon whose barely-of-age shoulders rested the security and future of their society and way of life. 87731.
Monks was a Daily Mail journalist embedded in France with the RAF in the early days prceding the Battle of Britain, and was close friends with a number of the men who fought the seemingly inexhaustible waves of Luftwaffe seeking to subjugate Europe under fascism. His central point is one that is often overlooked in stirring accounts of Spitfires and Hurricanes scrambling across the skies of Europe; no man had, previous to the early days of WW2, fought another man at 30,000 feet in an "orange crate" made out of aluminium and canvas, screaming across the sky at 350mph, firing 9600 rounds per minute. Everything we now know about being a fighter pilot had to be developed from the ground up by these men; additionally it had to be conceived by men whose average age was 22, and upon whose barely-of-age shoulders rested the security and future of their society and way of life. 87731.