Black Tulip: The Life and Myth of Erich Hartmann, the World's Top Fighter Ace

With over 1,404 wartime missions, Erich Hartmann claimed a staggering 352 airborne kills, and his career contains all the dramas you would expect. There were the frostbitten fighter sweeps over the Eastern Front, drunken forays to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, a decade of imprisonment in the wretched Soviet POW camps, and further military service during the Cold War that ended with conflict and angst.



Hartmann was adopted by a network of writers and commentators personally invested in his welfare a...