A moving and engrossing novel of World War II by the author of the acclaimed Goshawk Squadron - the powerful, quietly savage, funny and heart-piercing story of a group of young R.A.F. pilots, mere boys of 19 and 20, during the year from September 1939 (the beginning of the so-called Phony War, when fighting men were filled with chivalric fantasies of honor and derring-do, and life in uniform was a luxurious escapade), to September 1940: The deadly realities of the Battle of Britain and the huge Luftwaffe raid on London that was the culmination of Hitler's airborne Blitzkrieg. Dominating the squadron of untried English airmen are two outsiders: polar opposites, rivals, yet prickly friends - Keith "Funny" Barton, the phlegmatic, patriotic, awkward New Zealander who becomes Leader, and Christopher Hart II (alias CH3), a brilliant and truculent American flyer who, having exhausted all the risks the Spanish Civil War and China had to offer, gets posted to Hornet Squadron, where his battle experience sets him violently at odds with a textbook tactician of a Commanding Officer. Around these men, Derek Robinson gives us a large, brilliantly realized cast of characters: the other flyers, whose anarchic stunts and easy gang loyalty mask the deeper trouble s and animosities that flare among men of very different temperaments and backgrounds who are forced to live in irritable intimacy on the ground, but who in the sky depend for their very lives on each other's vigilance..their officers, obsessed with "leadership" in all its class-ridden, comic and bullying manifestations but uncomprehending of the ruthless skills required of a fighter pilot in war...their girlfriends, who are their only, tenuous connection to another life "outside"...and, in their midst, to the consternation of some (including CH3) and the delight of others, an American - and female - war correspondent, Jacky Bellamy, whose glamourized reporting of the squadron's fears gradually gives way to a more penetrating investigation of the conduct of the war itself. Robinson writes about them from the inside, with real empathy, never mocking, and yet he is able to show all that is brutal and, moment by moment, uncontrollably funny about the chaos of war. We watch this band of barely-out-of-the-schoolroom pilots on their first joyous posting to France, flying novice patrols and lording it over a requisitioned chateau and the somewhat bemused local inhabitants, their biggest challenge to the Germans an amicably rude duel of loudspeakers across the Rhine..we see the pranks that begin to turn ugly as friendships edge into rivalry...we see the first "kills" of enemy aircraft, which wrench these men out of their romantic charade to the realization that playing God in the air is addictive. And then, as France falls, the grimness begins in earnest. Regrouped in England, the squadron is sucked into a maelstrom of accelerating confusion and danger, of grueling contests with enemy fighters, of a rising toll of dead and missing...and as they sweep again and again into the sky, into the heart-stopping terror of their "business," we go with them, caught up in the unbearable urgency and excitement of second-by-second war in the air, and the pitiless ironies of its outcome. In its revelations of character, its mesmerizing combination of horror and blistering wit, its utterly convincing rendering of what it was really like, Piece of Cake sets Derek robinson apart as a novelist of rare power and distinction.