Messerschmitts Over Sicily Johannes Steinhoff by Johannes Steinhoff 9780811772341, 0811772349 instant download after payment.

Few weapons in the history of human conflict have so seamlessly melded both elegance and lethality into design and function as the German Messerschmitt Me 109 in the Second World War. Fewer still were the men able to wield this magnificent fighter plane with the skill, determination, and courage of legendary Luftwaffe fighter pilot Johannes Steinhoff. This fateful pairing of man and machine would prove one of the most deadly combinations in the tumbling skies of aerial combat over Europe during the entire war.

Credited with 176 aerial victories, Steinhoff saw action in almost every major campaign in World War II. His amazing combat career took him through the very pinnacle of the Luftwaffe’s success in the fighting in France and Norway, crossing the English Channel to tangle with Spitfires and Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain, patrolling vast expanses of the Eastern Front, supporting Rommel’s Afrika Corps in North Africa, Rumania, and, finally, as witness to the Luftwaffe’s absolute nadir, flying the new jet fighter, the Me 262, in the desperate air defense of Germany itself. Steinhoff also flew in the skies over Italy in the summer of 1943 as Germany began to recede on all fronts. Gone was the thought of conquest, replaced now with the desire to survive.

Messerschmitts over Sicily chronicles the frantic months of June and July 1943 as the Luftwaffe fought to stay alive. Johannes Steinhoff played a key role in that struggle. To read it in his own words is to feel yourself strapped into the cockpit of a Me 109 hurtling through a metal-torn sky, your head on a swivel, your stomach in your throat, and your heart racing.

This is aerial combat as fought, and told, by one of its masters