Casemate is pleased to announce that FOGG IN THE COCKPIT is now available. We took a moment to talk to the authors, Richard and Janet Fogg, and here’s what they had to say…..
Why did you decide to write this book? What prompted you to put this story down on paper?
Fogg In The Cockpit began, and ended, as a labor of love, but the focus of that love changed as the work unfolded. Howard Fogg’s legacy was already firmly established thanks to his success as a railroad artist, but what son or daughter-in-law could resist the opportunity to build on that legacy when presented with a document as fascinating as a wartime diary? The format is compelling: no facts lost or colored by time, the trivial and the significant presented with equal clarity, terms, conditions, and events offered up not through the veil of nostalgia but simply as fact. This, then, was the basis, and the inspiration, for Fogg In The Cockpit.
And then the unexpected. The secondary players, men whose names would never appear on an internet search engine, took on a life of their own. Men who helped win the war and then came home to lead quiet lives. Men who, far too often, did not come home. The book was not just about Captain Fogg anymore, it was about the 359th Fighter Group; its pilots, officers, and support personnel. The supporting cast became stars, and the love of Howard Fogg, with whom we shared a lifetime, became a love of the men of the 359th, men we would never have had the privilege and honor of knowing if it were not for Fogg In The Cockpit.
The Casemate Blog 
Those were the great steam trains of the Great Western Railway and I just loved them. Hobbs was further inspired by the works of American steam locomotive artist Howard Fogg whose depictions of steam engines roaring across the 20th century American landscape earned Fogg the title of Dean of Railroad Artists.When Hobbs emigrated to Canada in 1959 he came upon the wave of what he terms the brain drain of British doctors from Great Britain to Canada during the late 1950s and 1960s.