A brand new book telling the deeply moving stories of 14 Spitfire pilots who failed to return from their missions has been released.

Spitfire Down, by the author Dilip Sarkar MBE, tells the stories of the pilots through personal letters, diaries, and photographs from family archives and other sources.

In each case, the author expertly reconstructs the men’s final sorties and their fates.

Among the stories told of those of Sergeants Charles Gardner and Donald Carruthers.

Gardner and Carruthers, both Canadian pilots serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, suffered similar fates when their Spitfires crashed into Pen yFan in bad weather on the November 3 1941 and May 23 1942.

Given Pen y Fan’s popularity with walkers, it is amazing that a sizeable amount of wreckage from Carruthers’s aircraft – an aircraft which survived the Battle of Britain - remains visible on the mountain to this day, completely unknown to most of the general public.

In Spitfire Down, Sakar presents the most detailed investigation ever made into the Brecon Beacons plane crash, forensically investigating the lives, and reconstructing the deaths of these two young men on one of Wales’s most notorious mountains.

Spitfire Down is published by Pen and Sword Books and is available in hardback form for £25.