Cinderella boys - Leo McKinstry

No. 7 in the Daily Telegraph Top 50 Best Books of 2023 and a History Book of the Year

The remarkable story of the unsung RAF wing who rescued Britain from Hitler's U-boats and made Allied victory possible.

In early 1943 Britain was engaged in an epic struggle for survival. As the deadly wolf packs of German U-boats roamed the Atlantic, supply lines and shipping losses fell victim to the carnage.

In desperation, Churchill turned to the RAF's maritime wing - an overlooked, underfunded force known as "The Cinderella Service". But the ascendancy of the U-boat forced a change in attitude. Provided with the long-range planes, depth charges, rocket projectiles and radar equipment with which to challenge the enemy. The Cinderella boys provided vital air defence the whole way across the Atlantic. The German hunters were now the hunted, and - in a stunning defeat - had fully retreated by the summer of 1943.

The transformation of Coastal Command from a ramshackle outfit into a vast, formidable organisation provided one of the turning points of the war, keeping Britain in the war and opening the way to D-Day in 1944. But they never received the credit they deserved.

Based on a wealth of new sources, including from diaries, log books, official records, archives and interviews, Leo McKinstry shines a new light the courageous pilots, ingenious scientists and political risktakers - many of them outsiders - who defended the freezing Atlantic from Nazi rule.