In the summer of 1940, fewer than three thousand young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force stood between Hitler and the victory that seemed almost within his grasp. In this superb history of three epic months that saved the world, Michael Korda brilliantly re-creates the intensity of combat in "the long, delirious, burning blue" of the sky above southern England—while tracing, perhaps for the first time, the entire complex web of political, diplomatic, scientific, industrial, and human decisions during the 1930s that inexorably led to the world's first, greatest, and most decisive air battle. With Wings Like Eagles brings to vivid life the extraordinary men and women on both sides of the conflict—from Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, and Reichsmarschall Hermann GÖring to the ground crews, the German pilots, the American volunteers, and the courageous airmen and airwomen of the RAF.

A Rolls Royce Silver Cloud drove him to airports; the British film industry kowtowed to his power; the great Hollywood studios fawned at his feet.Sir Alexander Korda, one of the world's most flamboyant movie tycoons, rose from obscurity in rural Hungary to become a legendary filmmaker. With him were his brothers, Zoltan and Vincent, all living charmed lives in circles that included H. G. Wells, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Marlena Dietrich, Vivien Leigh, and Merle Oberon, who was soon to be Alex's wife. But along with Alex's flair for success was an equally powerful impulse for destruction. Now, Vincent's son, Michael Korda, in the first book of his memoirs, recalls the enchanted figures of his childhood...the glory days of the Korda brothers' great films...and then their heartbreaking, tragic end.