At an age when many young people are still in high school, Jim (“Stocky”) Edwards was training with the RCAF to head overseas. It’s an extraordinary story. Edwards’ war service cut short a possible career in professional hockey, his enlistment pre-empting a tryout with the Chicago Blackhawks. His flying career reads like something out of Star Wars. On his first combat flight over North Africa he brought down a Messerschmitt. Altogether he flew 373 operational sorties, surviving several hits and a crash on a mountaintop. To be a flying ace, author Barbara Hehner tells us, you have to shoot down at least five enemy planes. Edwards brought down well over 20. At the end of the war, not quite 24, he was a wing commander.

This is Hehner’s second biography of a Second World War hero; her previous title, The Tunnel King, was nominated for both Silver Birch and Willow awards. The Desert Hawk is the result of many hours of interviews with Edwards. It is enhanced by pictures from family albums of Jim as a boy, Jim in the desert, Jim as a jet-fighter pilot, Jim newly decorated with the Order of Canada by the Governor General in 2004. Hehner, a Toronto writer who appears to have written almost as many children’s books as Stocky Edwards has shot down planes, tells the story simply and directly, letting the astonishing facts speak for themselves.

She also solves a longstanding mystery about the purpose of those dashing silk scarves worn by all flying aces from the Red Baron to Snoopy. In fact, Hehner reveals, they kept the pilot’s neck from chafing against his collar as his head constantly searched the skies for enemy planes.