The Korean Kid: A Young Australian Pilot's Baptism of Fire in the Jet Fighter Age

A vicious civil conflict erupted on the Korean peninsula in 1950 and sucked 24 nations into a new round of fighting. The world’s two atomic superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – menaced each other across an arbitrary border as Korea became the proving ground for a new Cold War.

The odds faced by Australia’s young pilots were one in three, that they’d not come back. Or perhaps they’d just never be found, crash in flames into a foreign mountain and become nothing but names in...