1000 Destroyed: The Life and Times of the 4th Fighter Group by Hall, Grover Cleveland

Used - Good. hardcover. Dust jacket and edges shows wear. Pages are clean and intact. 1965 edition

This book, drawn from Capt. Hall's war diaries, first appeared in a limited edition in 1946. It sold out almost immediately. Over the years it has become one of the most sought-after of all aviation books, a collector's item for which enthusiasts have willingly paid many times the original price.
The 4th Fighter Group's first pilots came from the three original Eagle Squadrons, Royal Air Force units manned by American volunteers who flew in combat before Pearl Harbor. These were men like Chesley Peterson, who washed out of the pre-war Air Corps for "lack of inherent flying ability." Peterson's talents in an RAF Spitfire earned for him the British DFC and DSO and he became at the age of 23 the youngest Colonel in USAAF history. ,Don Gentile, another Air Corps reject, got into the fighting through the RAF. Before he was done he wore almost every American decoration, had 30 swastikas on his P-51 and heard General Eisenhower say, "You are a one-man air force!" Gentile's wingmate was John Godfrey who claimed 26 German planes, went home to Rhode Island for a breather, then came back to knock down 10 more.
There was Don Blakeslee, said to have flown more than 1,000 hours in combat, and George Green who landed his fighter in a pasture near Berlin to pick up a friend. And Kid Hofer, "Swede" Carlson, Steve Pissanos, "The Greek", Goody Goodson, Cowboy Megura, Deacon Hively, Mike Sobanski . . . young men who wrote a blazing chapter of air history across the perilous skies of Europe. This book is about these men.