France's leading World War II ace, Pierre Clostermann, flew 420 missions and had thirty-three confirmed kills, all entered in his personal journal with the fiery idealism and impetuosity of youth. He fashioned the entries into The Big Show, a gripping description of air combat - and also a sensitive, understated story of expatriates in battle.

A licensed pilot who built his own plane at age seventeen, Clostermann was studying engineering in the U.S. when France fell. Soon afterward, his father, who had joined the Free French, sent him a telegram saying, "Join up with de Gaulle or you are no son of mine." Carrying little more than the suit on his back and his fishing rods, Clostermann crossed the Atlantic, arriving in Liverpool as the city was being bombarded.

His offer of servico to the Royal Air Force was greeted with laughter until a flight test was arranged. Soon he was enrolled in the R.A.F. college at Cranwell. Until the end of the war, except for a brief period as a staff officer, Clostermann was a combat pilot, fighting the very best the Luftwaffe could send into the air.

Deeply enamored of flying, the young man revels in its beauties; of a pre-dawn radar calibration flight he writes, "Beneath my wings was night - I was alone, 30.000 feet up in the daylight. I was the first to breathe in the warm life of the sun's rays, which pierce the eyeball like arrows. In France, in England, in Belgium, in Holland, in Germany, men were suffering in the night, whilst I alone in the sky, was the sole possessor of the dawning day - all was mine, the light, the sun, and I thought with calm pride: all this shining only for me!".

The highly decorated Clostermann became an R.A.F. Squadron Commander, perhaps the highest praise that proud service could offer. He earned the honor in long, hard battles, which he relates in the book with vivid intimacy. Of an encounter with a Focke-Wulf he writes, "I could already see the little blue flames of exhausts, the oxide trail left by the burning gases along his fuselage, his emerald green back and his pale belly like the pike I used to fish for in the old days in the Mayenne. Suddenly the sharp clear picture shook, disintegrated. The gleaming cockpit burst into fragments. My 20 mm. shell tore into him, advancing towards the engine in a series of explosions and sparks that danced on the aluminium. Then a spurt of flame, thick black smoke mixed with flaming particles".

But above and beyond the young man's passion for flying and the inveterate warrior's lust for combat, The Big Show reveals the devoted patriot's deep love of his country. He grieves over having to attack French towns and railroads, even thought he knows it must be done. He enjoys tremendous satisfaction in helping wrest control of the air from the Germans, for whom he has a coldly professional admiration. Most gratifying of all, he becomes the first French pilot to land in France following the invasion.

After the war, Clostermann plunged into politics and business with the same ebullient enthusiasm that had made him a great fighter pilot, serving with distinction as Deputy in the French parliament and as an aeronautics executive for Cessna and Dassault. He has now retired with his wife Jacqueline to Montesquieu, a picturesque village in the Pyrenees. He still sallies forth on great adventures, but now the big show is deep-sea fishing. A trustee of the World Game Fish Organization, he spends the winter month writing books about the triumphs of the summer.

Walter J. Boyne From the Introduction of the Wing of War Collection edited by TIME Life