No Margin For Error

The Making of the Israeli Air Force

Ehud YonayBibliography Excerpt from No Margin for Error by Ehud Yonay.pdf


ISBN: 0-679-41563-7


426 pages

Hardback



Ehud Yonay was an award-winning US investigative reporter, whose story of
US Navy fighter pilots was made into the movie ‘Top Gun’.



In ‘No Margin For Error’, he catalogues the history of the Israeli Air Force from its formation in 1948 as a handful of secondhand WW II light aircraft and a small international group of volunteer flyers, through to the sophisticated modern air force that carried out the audacious attack on the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981. Using interviews with scores of airmen and government leaders, citations from official archives, published memoirs and articles, and private diaries, Yonay describes how the Israelis created a potent air force that helped preserve the nation in its four wars, chief amongst which was the Six-Day War, in which the IAF's destruction of the bulk of Egypt's air force on the tarmac enabled the ground forces to win their epic victories.


Written in a ‘boys own’ style that is often as cavalier and gung-ho as the early pioneers of Israeli military aviation, ‘No Margin For Error’ is, nonetheless, a riveting read and a well-researched, valuable contribution to military history.


Naval Eight / 208 Squadron Association members will be most interested in Chapter 6: ‘Bloodying the RAF’ which describes, from an Israeli perspective, their infamous attack on 208 Squadron on 7 January 1949. An excerpt of this is included in the Spitfire / Hurricane / Lysander Anecdotal Histories section of this Website within Roy Bowie’s account of the period 1947 - 1948.

Click on the photo of the book cover above to read a PDF excerpt taken from Chapter 6, which describes the IAF’s encounter with 208 Squadron from their perspective.

Published by

Pantheon Books

A division of Random House Inc
New York


1st Edition 1993

Bibliography 02

Back to
Bibliography