Dornier Do17, the Yugoslav Story, an operational record 1937-1947

Vazduhoplovstvo Vojske Kraljevine Jugoslavije (Royal Yugoslav Air Force – VVKJ) found itself in unenviable if not dramatic position in the mid-thirties. Only few years earlier, VVKJ was counted among the ten largest and best equipped air forces in the world, but in those days a few years in aviation technology were eternity. Huge fleet of Breguets, Potez', Avias and Dewoitines aged overnight with the appearance of the fast, metal-skinned, monoplanes. Obsolescence of the Yugoslav fighter and bomber force became so dramatic that immediate modernization plans were drawn, funds raised despite the economic crisis, and search for new aircraft opened. Those efforts were followed by serious difficulties, setbacks, extortions and broken promises, but it eventually lead to acquisitions,although in small numbers, of some of finest aircraft of the epoch. One of these was Claude Dornier's graceful, sleek medium bomber – the Do 17. By a strange concurrence of events, Yugoslav pilots were to use various versions of this aircraft for more than a decade within five different air forces and in area that swept from African desert to frozen steppes in the far north. Their German and Bulgarian counterparts roamed the Yugoslav skies with Do 17 from the first to the last day of war. This book tells the previously untold story of bomber crews of the Royal Yugoslav Air Force and their tough resistance during the April War, of German aerial operations over Yugoslavia, of Croat Leggionnaires and their endeavour on the Eastern Front, of Croat flying units struggling to counter the insurgency, of Bulgarian actions against Yugoslav Partisans and later Germans, and of Partisan efforts to form their own aviation and liberate the country. This is a story of a decennium of Do17 flying...