After 60 years languishing in the Russian State Military Archive, Heinrich Gerlach’s novel of his experiences in Stalingrad is finally published.  Uncompromising and oppressive, Breakout at Stalingrad is a remarkable testament to the horror war and the affect on the men caught up in it.

The race to go faster, further and higher has intoxicated man since before Icarus took to his wings.  In the 20th Century, man didn’t just take to the air, but slipped it’s confines for space.  A very select few (a total of 24 men) were able to gaze back and see our home in all it’s glory.  With The Earth Gazers, Christopher Potter looks how those men got up there and how what they felt was as important as what they saw.

Clare Mulley’s latest book, The Women Who Flew For Hitler, is a fascinating look at two remarkable and complicated women, Melitta von Stauffenberg and Hanna Reitch.  As test pilots for the Third Reich, they were at the forefront of aviation and tumultuous times.  The book is an intimate and honest biography and Clare has kindly taken some time to answer a few of my questions about it.

Clare Mulley’s new biography looks at two incredible, yet very different women who were pinoneering Test Pilots for the Third Reich.  In The Women Who Flew For Hitler, Mulley looks at what drove these women in a male dominated flying world and the very different directions they chose under a Nazi flag.

The men and women who resisted Hitler have been cast as heroes and villains of both the left and right.  The conspirators and their actions have been remembered in black and white, with the viewer choosing the colours with which to paint them.  In Danny Orbach’s new history of the resistance, The Plots Against Hitler, he very convincingly shows us that rather than pure saints or sinners, the complexity and contradictions of the conspirators makes them that most difficult of things to digest, human.

The Blackbird series of aircraft, by the legendary Lockheed designer Kelly Johnson, is the subject of James Hamilton-Paterson’s latest non-fiction venture into aviation.  Hamilton-Paterson tells a tale of Cold War paranoia and desperation that lead to an incredible aircraft that lived out beyond Mach 3 on the meter.  Blackbird is a worthy tribute to her designer, those brave Habu and the incredible craft they rode.

I have loved Robert Radcliffe’s previous five novels, to the point I even read one of them as an eBook.   Radcliffe’s new tale is his most ambitious yet.  Airborne is the first of trilogy of novels telling the tale of a boy caught between countries, in search of a father and who finds two; John Frost, godfather of the Parachute Regiment and Erwin Rommel, The Desert Fox.

Rowland White’s fourth book tells the tale of the development of the first two Space Shuttles, Enterprise and Columbia.  Following the crews that would glide Enterprise from the back of a 747 and then blast off atop the loudest rockets ever built, Into The Black is a fascinating tribute to Columbia. 

When my Grandparents came over for a mammoth visit after we had moved to England, I had an old Canadian TV and VCR to watch the tapes we’d brought with us.  My Granma brought me a bunch of old movies, which is what she always did when we spent time together.  She introduced me to some of the greatest films I have ever seen and, also, that good movies do not also need to be made in colour.  On this trip, knowing me as she did, she brought me a copy of an RKO Picture called Spitfire.

One of the defining moments of my young life happened on a raining autumn day in 1988 on a family holiday to London.  We visited Barnardo’s, where my father had spent a brief period with his sister after they had been taken from their mother.  We sat in a dull office and a rather officious woman explained to my father that his father was a German POW named Herman.  A brief moment of shock and pain for my Dad, who was finally learning a truth about his life he had never known.