Air raid sirens wail, searchlight beams flash across the sky, and the night is aflame with tracer fire and aerial explosions, as Allied bombers and German anti-aircraft units duel in the thundering darkness. Such cinematic scenes, played out with increasing frequency as World War II drew to a close, were more than mere stock for movie melodramas. As Edward Westermann reveals, they point to a key but largely unappreciated aspect of the German war effort that has yet to get its full due. Long the neglected stepchild in studies of World War II air campaigns, German flak or anti-aircraft units have been frequently dismissed by American, British, and German historians (and by veterans of the European air war) as ineffective weapons that wasted valuable materiel and personnel desperately needed elsewhere by the Third Reich. Westermann emphatically disagrees with that view and makes a convincing case for the significant contributions made by the entire range of German anti-aircraft defenses. - Jacket flap.