EAGLES OVER GAZALA

Di Michele Palermo questo titolo in lingua inglese dedicato alle battaglie aeree combattute nei cieli nord africani tra il maggio-giugno 1942. Trattazione ben dettagliata ricca di informazioni storiche solo di recente rese disponibili al pubblico.

The events of the air war over the desert duringWorldWar II have been covered by a fair number of studies, mostly in the English language. The works range from author Roderick Owen’s pioneering ‘The DesertAir Force’ (1948) to the classic ‘Fighters over the Desert’ by Christopher Shores and Hans Ring. All of these works have contributed over the years to a better understanding of that air campaign. However, out of necessity, they only give a partial view of the events that is generally linked to the nationality of the authors. The accuracy of the data provided in these studies was also affected by the fact that, in the immediate years after the war’s end, much of the official documentation was kept secret or made available only to the authors of the so-called ‘official histories’ published by the air forces of the involved countries. Consequently, a complete historical reconstruction that draws directly from the analysis of the official documents from all the contenders, therefore allowing the reader to have a clear and complete picture of the actual course of events, has always been missing. Now that the official records have finally been made available to the researchers, new struggles have emerged.Attempts to provide such a framework clashed with the difficulty of describing with the right degree of precision the complexity of multiple aerial combats between contenders of half a dozen different air forces that often overlap in space and time. This problem has only been overcome through using a fair level of approximation or through limiting the scope of the study to a specific unit or air force. Michele Palermo, in his work, finally offers us this long-awaited, fully-detailed reconstruction, covering short time intervals in multiple volumes, in a way that allows him to describe the events with the greatest possible accuracy.