Fighter Boys: saving Britain 1940 by Patrick Bishop

Chivalry and single combat in modern warfare

"They say he's just a crazy sort of guy": Richard Hillary, in his autobiography The Last Enemy, quotes from the song "Silver Wings" to describe the popular perception of the Second World War fighter pilot.

Hillary was Oxbridge, brilliant and rebellious to the point of self-destruction. Like many of his peers, he believed the fighter returned war to combat between two people, in which one kills or is killed: "It's exciting, it's individual, and it's disinterested." He was killed in 1942, aged 23, when his plane crashed in a night training operation.

In Fighter Boys, Patrick Bishop has written a superb account of the spirit and character of Fighter Command, as painstakingly detailed and compelling in its narrative as any front-rank history of 20th-century war. The "shock and awe" strategy of current military engagement is a long way from the cultivation of personality encouraged in the RAF of 1940. As Bishop shows, Fighter Command consisted of the most motley élite ever in British military history. The RAF attracted men who were independent-minded, adventurous and unusual, even eccentric.

In America, the pilot as social outcast spilled over into motorcycle gangs such as the Hell's Angels, formed by disaffected airmen unable to calm their demons in peacetime. In 1947, the Hell's Angel's destroyed the town of Hollister, California – immortalised in Stanley Kramer's 1953 movie The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando – as eccentricity turned into public menace.

British pilots preferred to assume a more devil-may-care attitude: "a self-conscious satisfaction in our ability to succeed without apparent effort". Before Dunkirk added another dimension to human cruelty, life in the air wasn't taken too seriously: "We were quite untrained, lacked any form of organisation and were really quite hopelessly casual".

The plucky amateur ethos was reinforced when three part-time auxiliary pilots drew first blood in Second World War air combat. They shot down several Junkers 88 fast bombers attacking the Royal Navy base at Rosyth. The three singled out as heroes were identified by their professions: a solicitor, a farmer and a plasterer.

Fighter pilots were loners who required the soft touch of a pianist to operate the highly sensitive controls of a Spitfire or Hurricane, planes twice as potent as anything they had flown before. They also needed pin-sharp eyesight in the virtually radar-less skies, and the stamina to evade the ever-present shadow of fear. A dogfight would have the out-of-body intensity of a car crash as aircraft flying at over 300mph tried to shoot each other out of the clouds. One pilot's biggest concern was "how deadly scared I'd been when I first saw those enemy bullets streaming past my wing-tip. I had never known any fear like that before in my life."

Nowadays, we do not go to war unless absolute victory is assured over a far weaker adversary. The Battle of Britain was fought and won against the odds because, as one pilot put it, "I was all set for Cambridge, I owned a lovely little car and damn it I was enjoying life. Then this shit-head comes along and puts the lid on everything." The Briton roused to righteous indignation is a fearsome thing.