Fightin' Air Force #19

When Captain Redman survives an encounter with Germany's new ME 262 jet fighter—the deadly "Sturmvogel"—he proposes a daring solution: equipping Allied fighters with JATO rockets to match the enemy's speed. Working with Colonel Atkins and a special crew, Redman volunteers to test the experimental combination in combat over German skies. What unfolds is a high-stakes race to prove that innovation and nerve can turn the tide against Hitler's most advanced weapon.

Stranded in the North African desert with Rommel's forces closing in, a sergeant and a young soldier face their greatest enemy: thirst. When the soldier desperately demands a drink from the sergeant's canteen, the older man refuses to share—but his refusal masks a resourceful plan to keep them both alive. Over three grueling days, rationing becomes the difference between survival and surrender.

When German tanks threaten to cut off American forces at Kasserine Pass, a B-25 Mitchell bomber crew—including Captain Williams and his gunners—scramble to support the pinned-down G.I.s below. With damaged aircraft and Nazi armor closing in from all sides, the flyboys must keep their crippled plane airborne long enough to turn the tide on the ground.

Captain Gary Lund is shot down over New Guinea and rescued by an unexpected ally: Ex-Major Rene de Salles, a French pilot who arrives in a meticulously maintained 1917 Spad biplane to save him from attacking Japanese Zeros. When Lund discovers de Salles is aging and losing his edge, he agrees to become the unlikely pilot of the antique fighter for a daring mission against a Japanese fuel depot—relying on cunning and a risky glide-bombing approach to strike where modern reflexes alone might fail. It's a wild partnership born of necessity in the skies over the South Pacific, where an old war bird and a young American flyer team up to even the odds.

A tail gunner with a reputation for bad luck joins a B-24 bomber crew, earning nicknames and jokes from his squadmates after surviving five bailouts and seven wounds. When orders send him back into combat over Berlin, Foley discovers that his quiet determination and survival instinct might be worth more than anyone back at the base ever realized. This war story, from the pages of Fightin' Air Force, shows how a soldier dismissed as a sad sack just might have the last laugh.