The Few: The American 'Knights of the Air' Who Risked Everything to Save Britain in the Summer of 1940

It was the summer of 1940, and World War II had been raging for nearly a year. Buoyed by his successes on the Continent, Hitler was now planning an invasion of England to seal Europe’s fate.Though the United States was still a neutral country, a few Americans decided they couldn’t remain on the sidelines. They joined Britain’s Royal Air Force to defend the country—with the future of civilization hanging in the balance.The Few tells the dramatic and unforgettable story of these Americans who defied their own country’s neutrality laws and risked their very citizenship to fight side-by-side with England’s finest pilots. Flying the lethal and elegant Spitfire, they became “knights of the air” who, with minimal training but plenty of guts, dueled the skilled and fearsome aces of Germany’s Luftwaffe.By October 1940, they had helped England win the greatest air battle in the history of aviation. Some five years later, at war’s end, just one of them would be alive. Winston Churchill once said famously of all those who fought in the Battle of Britain, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” These daring Americans were the few among the “few.”