This image is the cover for the book September Evening

September Evening

The true story of the daredevil flying ace who rivaled the Red Baron, with photos included.

This is the first full-length biography of nineteen-year-old Werner Voss, a legend in his lifetime and the youngest recipient of the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest award for bravery in WWI. At the time of his death he was considered by many, friend and foe alike, to be Germany’s greatest ace—and, had he lived, Voss would almost certainly have overtaken Manfred von Richthofen’s victory total by early spring of 1918.

Voss is perhaps best remembered for his outstanding courage, his audacity in the air, and the prodigious number of victories he achieved before being killed in one of the most swashbuckling and famous dogfights of the Great War: a fight involving James McCudden and 56 Squadron RFC, the most successful Allied scout squadron.

Yet the life of Voss and the events of that fateful September day are surrounded by mystery and uncertainty, and even now aviation enthusiasts continue to ask questions about him on an almost daily basis. Barry Diggens was determined to uncover the truth, and September Evening unearths and analyzes every scrap of information concerning this extraordinary young man. Diggens’s conclusions are sometimes controversial but his evidence is persuasive, and this study will be welcomed by, and of great interest to, the aviation fraternity worldwide.

Barry Diggens

Barry Diggens has been a bookseller for more than thirty years and is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association. He was born in Berkshire but has lived most of his years on the east coast of Kent. He and his wife, Sheila, have two daughters and three grandsons—the pride of his life.

Diggens first developed an interest in the Great War during the 1950s when he spent many school holidays with family friends in a little French village not too far from Albert in the valley of the Somme. Here, he found relics of the First World War which fired his interest.

Later in his life, and by now a confirmed bibliophile, Diggens was well placed to root-out many well known, and not so well known, literary and technological classics of that first great war in the air. These precious tomes, gathered from all over the world, now have pride of place in his large collection of reference works; many of which proved essential to the completion of September Evening, his first book, a labour of love that took almost five years to bring to fruition.

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