My vote goes to ‘Goshawk Squadron’. Stunning tale! But I am biased because my aviation interest tends toward WW1…..

Simon, I can’t recommend “Aces High” by Alan Clark (1973) highly enough. A beautifully written, researched and illustrated book, it’s an ideal reference for your needs.

‘Amazon’ have it listed as quite readily available, both new and pre-loved.

Cheers, Matt

According to Stephen E Ambrose, and therefore according to the men of Easy Company who knew him:

“Sobel…was fairly tall, slim in build, with a full head of black hair. His eyes were slits, his nose large and hooked. His face was long and his chin receded. He had been a clothing salesman and knew nothing of the out-of-doors. He was ungainly, uncoordinated, in no way athletic. His mannerisms were ‘funny’, he ‘talked different’. He exuded arrogance.

Running up Currahee, Sobel was at the head of the company, head bobbing, arms flapping…..with his big flat feet he ran like a duck in distress.

Sobel was a petty tyrant put into a position in which he had absolute power. There was a cruelty to the man. Sobel was the classic chickensh!t. He generated the maximum anxiety over matters of minimum significance.”

The producers of ‘Band of Brothers’ went to enormous trouble to accurately depict the men of Easy Company, including selecting actors who bore a strong physical resemblance to the men they were playing, and with so many of the veterans involved in the series it is difficult to believe that the producers would have been allowed to stray too far from the truth.

It is easy to dismiss the unsympathetic way Sobel is portrayed as a clumsy pantomime bad-guy (as is often done) but in this case it was probably as accurate as it is possible to be.

A fair call and an informative answer! I guess what I was getting at was that particular actor was so well-known for his role in that inane American sit-com that it was awfully hard to accept him in the BoB role.

Thanks though, Door!

My over-simplified view: after some 30 years of intense interest in WW1 and WW2 aircraft, I have never known the museums to be so healthy, the magazines so full of the latest news, the sky so full of previously-extinct types and the events calenders so busy for the enthusiast.

Magic times.

What Arthur Harris would call “tripe of the wildest description”….

Boy, I wish I knew what the hell was going on…

I’ve never heard of any gunner, be they RAF or USAAF, being rewarded the title ‘ace’.

Tom McClean (multi-kill RAF air gunner) had several nicknames, two of which were ‘Killer’ and ‘Ace’, but these were bestowed by the press of the day, rather than the RAF!

I’m just a little unsure as to which Camel you’d like reference pics to, but if it helps, Revell released a model of Brown’s Camel in the 70’s. It had red and white diagonal stripes on the upper wing and upper fuselage, and vertical white stripes on the fuselage sides. I’ll stand corrected, but I seem to recall there were no roundels on the fuselage sides.

Hope this helps?