Free Shipping on orders of 8 or more books.
Applies to US Shipments only.
Please note, I do not add new books to my website until
I actually have them in stock, as too many times in the past there have been the so called check's in the mail issues with problems from release
dates to shipping and so on. Many of the new titles you see around I will carry
and when I do have the book in stock they will be posted immediately.
MUSSOLINI'S HAWKS THE FIGHTER UNITS OF THE AERONAUTICA NAZIONALE REPUBBLICANA 1943 - 1945
Book Type: S
by Marco Mattioli
Up to relatively recent times, the commonly
accepted number of air victories
gained by the ANR fighter pilots was between
239 and 240 planes shot down as
well as another 115 unconfirmed between
January 1944 and April 1945. However, a
re-examination of both British and American
operational reports led to reconsider
those numbers, showing how the air victories
actually gained by the Republican fighter
pilots probably totalled in truth one
quarter of the figures accepted for decades.
With this fact we don’t want to accuse the
Republican fighter pilots in any way of having
deliberately exaggerated their scores.
Moreover, we don’t mean with this
either to belittle or put into perspective the
contribution of the ANR to the war effort
of the Axis, or to minimize their moral motivations
and their great personal courage.
On the contrary the latter two aspects had
been shown to be fundamental in continuing
with the fight in a situation of complete
material and numerical inferiority,
but not in morale. This has been fully proved
not only by the hard air battles and by
the grave losses sustained by “Mussolini’s
Hawks” in a year and a half of war, but
also by the insignificant number of desertions
in their ranks. There were only two
RSI fighter pilots who voluntarily handed
themselves over to the enemy, while a
third had himself interned in Switzerland.
In fact it is as well to remember
that there were many more crews of
other belligerent nations that sought safety
in flight to Swiss territory. At the
end of the war numerous American aircraft
were parked at Swiss airports that
could be compared to just one Macchi
205 of the ANR, this fact in itself was
indicative of the devotion to duty of the
pilots of the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana.
Text: English
Pages: 284
Illustrated
|
