An excerpt from my book, Monty’s Flying Fortress, coming April 30 to all places where books are sold, and now available for preorder!

The ubiquitous Messerschmitt Bf 109 represented one of Germany’s most lethally effective and versatile fighters. Powered by a single Daimler-Benz engine, the Bf 109 could fly in all types of weather, race through the sky at over 400 miles per hour, execute hairpin turns, and outmaneuver pursuers at breakneck speed while delivering fire from a single 30mm MK 108 cannon and two 13mm MG 131 machine guns. Other weapons were later developed that could be mounted on its wings. The Bf 109 was thinly armored, however – meaning that its pilots could easily be shredded to pieces by enemy fire with the same brutal suddenness with which they destroyed their opponents. The Luftwaffe fighter pilots accepted this fate with reckless abandon like specters of the ‘Wilde Jagd’, or ‘wild hunt’, of German mythology – ghost riders hurtling furiously across the sky, doomed but riotously elated, driven only by a primordial urge to chase and kill. According to legend, the airborne phantoms of the Wilde Jagd could appear on the wind at any moment, often in lonely spots where least expected. To find oneself in the path of the flying huntsmen usually spelled death. The same reality applied to unsuspecting targets unlucky enough to find themselves in the sights of Bf 109s.

The lonely Bristol Bombay plane on the outskirts of Alexandria never saw them coming. Hardly a match for fighter planes, the Bombay was an aircraft type typically used by the British as a cargo plane for transporting wounded men from desert battlefields. Although it could be transformed into a medium bomber, the cumbersome Bombay was far from an ideal warplane. Indeed this particular plane was almost as defenseless as its occupants. It carried over a dozen wounded British soldiers, many of whom were confined to stretchers and could not move – men who, having narrowly survived the terror of tank battles in abysses of wilderness, hoped to find safety and healing in Cairo.

One man’s presence on the plane had unwittingly doomed them all. Lieutenant General William ‘Strafer’ Gott, aged 44, had been chosen to take command of the flailing British Eighth Army, which had suffered a series of humiliating and resounding defeats at the hands of Germany’s newly promoted Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox. Gott had been fighting in the desert since 1940. Although he had privately confided to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, that he was too weary of years of desert war to think of fresh solutions to the Rommel problem, Gott was resolved to do his duty….

The desert was deceptively quiet that day. The sleepy Borg el-Arab suburb was hardly a place where any violence was anticipated – at least until then. The area was ‘considered so safe that no escort had been found necessary for Winston [Churchill]’ when he was flying from there, according to CIGS Brooke. With earnest blue eyes and an air of quiet authority, Gott showed great courtesy when he boarded the plane. In those short moments, the ill-fated general made an enduring impression on his 18-year-old pilot, a plucky young Welshman named Hugh James, who would remember him vividly from that moment on. Unbeknownst to everyone, swarms of German fighter planes hellbent on wiping the general off the face of the earth were steadily closing in. Unexpected. Undetected. Unstoppable.

The first burst of enemy fire came only 12 minutes after take-off. The Luftwaffe pilots hit their helpless target with chilling precision. Both the Bombay’s engines went up in flames. In less than the blink of an eye, the plane had taken fatal hits. After a few moments of horrified confusion, James and other crew members realized they were not only under attack but heading straight for a crash. It was unthinkable. There shouldn’t have been any German fighter planes so close to Alexandria. It never happened and seemed as if it simply couldn’t be happening. But somehow it was. More fire came, igniting the fuel tank. That was the Bombay’s coup de grace. In a few minutes the plane would spiral out of control and shatter on the sands below. Death was in the air.

James had only seconds to react. With flames spreading in the cockpit, the determined Welshman resolved not to let the plane crash as long as he had life left in him…