] it got me curious as to what the reaction was in England to “Piece of Cake” when it showed up on film?
FWIW, back then in Toronto (Ontario, Canada), I watched it on TV, week after week.
The TV host mentioned British viewers’ complaints included: the exaggerated hostility towards the Eastern European pilots in the TV version.
I read the original novel about the same time when I was playing the WWII combat flight sims by Lucasfilm, such as Battle of Britain: Their Finest Hour and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, in which I tried some of the tactics learnt from the novel, and the sims were good enough that the tactics worked, such as firing the MGs at a target and then only firing the cannons when the MG tracers hit, flying towards the sun to spoof the bandit behind me, inverting my fighter before diving, &c.
As I usually prefer to read, and have often read, books about, or are actually written by, real combat pilots (for instance, I read Coonts, and avoided Clancy), this novel is one of my few exceptions.
WRT to the cast in the novel and in the TV version, my favourite was… CH3, the adventurer and Spanish Civil War veteran! Maybe from my POV as a North American, IMO CH3 was a team player, who wanted his wingmen, esp the newbies, to survive as a team.
I certainly didn’t mind the experience he practised and shared all the time: expecting an human enemy to break left more often than to break right, and to look over his left shoulder more often than over his right shoulder, while presuming the human enemy is right-handed; looking around and outside the cockpit all the time, &c.
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