Roald Dahl was badly wounded in Libya during the war, but he went on to serve in the RAF in Greece and Syria. In these spine-tingling tales of battles in the sky - and in the psyche - he draws on his own experiences and those of his friends and colleagues to convey the bizarre reality of a pilot's existence.

From the nervy jollity of life in the Ops room and the Mess in 'Death of an Old Old Man' to the nightmarish horror of being shot down in 'A Piece of Cake', or the infectious madness of war in 'Someone Like You', these stories capture with chilling clarity the experience of living with the daily possibility of extinction.