Prince of Aces

Vivid account of courage in air-to-air combat over Europe Amazing and dramatic true story of a prince in battle Driven by intense hatred for the Soviet Union - the Bolsheviks murdered his uncle in 1917 and the secret police later executed his father - Prince Leonidas Maximciuc, nephew of the Russian tsar, joined up with Romanian and Free Russian forces in 1942 at the age of sixteen. Already a budding fighter pilot, the young prince began a career in which he scored fifty-two aerial victories, destroyed twenty-seven Soviet tanks, and survived being shot down nine times - all in under three years. After the war, Maximciuc fought with Romanian anti-Communists and eventually served twenty years in the US Air Force.