The story of the desperate defence of the Third Reich by the Luftwaffe fighter pilots against the increasing Allied bomber offensive in the Second World War. The defence of the Reich was a life-and-death campaign in which the Luftwaffe's best fighter pilots attempted to defend German airspace against ever-larger formations of medium and heavy bombers from the RAF and USAAF. The fighter pilots flew both piston-engined aircraft and, eventually, the first operational jet fighters, using a variety of weapons and tactics to repel Allied air attacks on Germany and occupied Europe. Defenders of the Reich focuses on the history of the pilots, their aircraft, their weapons, their strenuous and dangerous missions, and the tactics employed by the Luftwaffe against the USAAF and RAF bombers from the summer of 1942 until the end of the war in Europe. They fought to the point of total annihilation as USAAF and RAF fighter planes decimated their ranks in the air and targeted their airfields with devastating low-level attacks. Historian Robert Forsyth uses German and Allied archive documents and interviews with former fighter pilots to tell the story of this final air campaign from the perspective of the Luftwaffe.
