This work presents the 20th-century's air battles in the words of those who fought them. Beginning with the jousts over the Western Front in 1914 up to the furious jet-driven sorties over Bosnia in 1999, these accounts give an experience of combat dogfights in the shell-blasted skies of war. It is about a form of combat that has changed beyond recognition. It gives details of the dauntingly high mortality rates among airmen, and insights into many other facets of a pilot's life from training to bailing out over enemy territory, what it was like to be interned and an account of being shot down in a blazing spitfire.