Day of the Flying Fox

Submitted by dmacdonell on Sun, 2009-10-04 13:59

Day of the Flying Fox

The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox

By Steve Pitt

978-1-55002-808-9
June 2008
152pp, Paperback
$19.99 CAD

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Most suitable for teachers or senior students interested in wartime history and how the allied air force contributed to the defeat of the German regime. - Diana Mumford, Canadian Teacher Magazine Fall 2008

... brings that exciting war era alive for boys who have always dreamed of flying war planes...

True North Perspective

Most suitable for teachers or senior students interested in wartime history and how the allied air force contributed to the defeat of the German regime.

Canadian Teacher Magazine

... a discursive biography that provides considerably more than a straight trajectory of a notable life.

The Globe & Mail

Canadian World War II pilot Charley Fox, now in his late eighties, has had a thrilling life, especially on the day in July 1944 in France when he spotted a black staff car, the kind usually employed to drive high-ranking Third Reich dignitaries. Already noted for his skill in dive-bombing and strafing the enemy, Fox went in to attack the automobile. As it turned out, the car contained famed German General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, and Charley succeeded in wounding him.

Rommel, who at the time was the Germans' supreme military commander in France orchestrating the Nazis' resistance to the D-day invasion, was never the same after that. Author Steve Pitt focuses on this seminal event in Charley Fox's life and in the war, but he also provides fascinating aspects of the period, including profiles of noted ace pilots Buzz Beurling and Billy Bishop, Jr., and Great Escape architect Walter Floody, as well as sidebars about Hurricanes, Spitfires, and Messerschmitts.