Jonathan Nicholas spent almost five years back-packing around the world before thirty years policing a British inner city. He began professional writing in 2011 with a regular column in Police Review magazine, publishing several books about travelling & his time in the police. Obtaining a pilot's license at seventeen, he's always loved aeroplanes & flying, now the main subject matter of his writing.
He is married with two adult children and lives in Nottingham with his wife and three cats.
Young Paul Goetz loves aeroplanes and so joins the Luftwaffe as soon as he can. Like so many, he’s taken in, swept along in the unquestioning tide of excitement, keen to be airborne as a fighter pilot.
His first posting sees him sent to Leningrad in December 1941. His squadron shoot down huge numbers of enemy aeroplanes and victory seems certain, but the war drags on for a second winter, becoming increasingly difficult. Comrades are lost or reported ‘Vermisst’ – missing – and he learns of terrible German activities across the east. Then, Paul’s nightmare becomes reality, when his engine fails behind enemy lines, and he is captured…
Vermisst: Missing in Russia is a rarity; an English-language novel written from a German viewpoint. Rich in historical details and packed with exciting aerial combat scenes, it is a gripping war story of extreme conditions, and survival in the harshest captivity.
Sunday 28th June 1942 Flight Sergeant Dennis Copping took off in a single-seat Kittyhawk fighter for a short flight across Egypt. He never arrived at his destination. The aeroplane was later found crash-landed, virtually intact, three hundred miles into the Sahara with no sign of the pilot. There is evidence he survived the landing and indeed stayed with the aeroplane for a while, but he has so far never been found. Why was it there and what happened to the pilot? After extensive research including regular contact with surviving relatives and the man who first found the aeroplane, Jonathan Nicholas has pieced together Dennis Copping's desert war blending real people, events and places into an exciting new novel, a thrilling wartime desert mystery never-before-told.