Skip to main content

Hostile Skies

March 2023
1min read

Clash of Wings
World War II in the Air


by Walter J. Boyne, Simon & Schuster, 415 pages, $25.00 . CODE: SAS-8

The air war began with a trio of Stuka dive bombers attacking Polish railroad bridges and ended with a lone B-29 opening its bomb-bay doors over Nagasaki. “The difference in capability between the slow, angular Stuka,” writes the veteran airman Walter J. Boyne, “its very shape a swastika in the sky, and the beautiful silver B-29 cruising high over Japan is a perfect example of the expansion of airpower that took place in six years of war. The relatively small 250kilogram bombs the Stukas used at Dirschau related directly to the past; the 23-kiloton yield of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb used at Nagasaki cast a terrible shadow for the future.”

What happened in between those two events is an immensely complicated tale made admirably clear by Boyne and told with vigor and conviction. His brisk, well-written history finds a nice balance between the technical elements and the human ones while it retells the familiar (but endlessly absorbing) story of the Battle of Britain, retrieves the woefully underappreciated efforts of the Russian air force, nods to the futile and forgotten gallantry of the Italian fliers, and follows America’s airborne fortunes from the hapless early days of the appropriately named Boeing P-26 Peashooter to the unchallengeable might of the Superfortresses.

The succinct appendix of aircraft types that closes the book gives the Douglas SBD Dauntless an epitaph any warplane would be proud to call its own: “Low-wing, all-metal, Ed Heinemann-designed dive-bomber; won Battle of Midway, and with it, Pacific war.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "October 1994"

Authored by: The Editors

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Authored by: The Editors

A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields

Authored by: The Editors

The Evolution of the Ballpark

Authored by: The Editors

Clash of Wings
World War II in the Air

Authored by: The Editors

American Flight Jackets, Airmen & Aircraft: A History of U.S. Flyers’ Jackets from World War I to Desert Storm

Authored by: The Editors

Shot in the Heart

Authored by: The Editors

Bettmann Portable Archive

Authored by: The Editors

Pictures of the Pain
Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy

Authored by: The Editors

Music by Elliott Carter, Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.