This expansion includes ace pilot Pierre Clostermann. He was a French flying Ace and joined the Free French Air Force in the United Kingdom in March 1942. After training at RAF Cranwell and 61 OTU, Clostermann, a sergeant pilot, was posted in January 1943 to No. 341 Squadron RAF (aka Groupe de Chasse n° 3/2 "Alsace"), flying the Supermarine Spitfire....
When the US Navy and Marine Corps entered the Second World War, they had only one effective fighter aircraft available to them: the F4F Wildcat. Fortunately, the Wildcat proved more than equal to the task of holding the line. The Wildcat was outperformed by the lighter Japanese Zero in turning and climbing, but the Wildcat was much more robust and heavily...
Erich Alfred Hartmann (19 April 1922 – 20 September 1993) was the most successful fighter ace in the history of aerial warfare. He was credited with 352 Allied aircraft downed - of which 350 were Soviet and 2 American over the course of WW2. This was despite 16 separate instances of being forced to crash land his fighter - either due to mechanical failure...
Initially a single seater, the Il-2 Sturmovik proved to be a deadly air-to-ground weapon. This variant was to see heavy losses due to its vulnerability to fighter attack. Consequently, by September 1942, a two-seat design with a rear gunner under a stretched canopy entered service. In the desperate months early in the war, the Sturmovik was pressed into a...
Kaneyoshi Muto earned his first air victory on 4 December 1937 during the Battle of Nanking when he shot down a Soviet-made Polikarpov I-16. He would go on to fight alongside Saburō Sakai on the island of Iwo Jima, surviving to be called by Sakai “the toughest fighter pilot in the Imperial Navy.” In December 1944, Muto was posted to the Japanese Home...