Compiled from diary entries, letters home, declassified Army Air Forces documents, and more recent reflections and anecdotes from the pilots themselves, this history of the Second Fighter Squadron's role in World War 2 portrays the air war in North Africa and Italy with an immediacy that can be found only in first-person accounts. Combining contemporaneous documentation of the squadron's missions with retrospective commentary from the pilots, the book gives the reader a glimpse of the inner life of one of the many "bands of brothers" whose wartime service did so much to shape their world and ours.