We Were Eagles Volume One: The Eighth Air Force at War July 1942 to November 1943 (1)

On 4 July 1942, American airmen flew in US-built bombers against a German target for the first time. A small operation involving six US crews in Boston medium bombers, it was nonetheless a harbinger of things to come. The first heavy bombardment group of B-17s had crossed the Atlantic in June 1942, another arriving by 1 August, the first small steps in the massive build up of B-17s and B-24s that would be based in Britain as part of the Eighth Air Force.

In this book, illustrated with both black and white and period color pictures, aviation historian Martin Bowman tells the story of US Eighth Air Force operations in the words of the men who flew them, from that first raid over the Netherlands and the first attack by the Fortresses against Rouen to the first attack on Germany itself and the infamous B-24 raid against the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti.