“My mother woke me up for the war” - this is how the famous journalist and writer Ilya Shatunovsky begins his story. And in that summer, when the war began and when he volunteered for the army, he was only seventeen years old... A cadet sent with his school to the front: street battles in Voronezh, hospital beds. Then a gunner in the rear cockpit of an Il-2 attack aircraft: air battles in the skies of Ukraine, over Budapest, Bratislava and Vienna, the death of friends and the joy of Victory... This book is a document of the Great Patriotic War, without fiction or embellishment.