In the years leading up to the Battle of Britain in WWII, two competitive college friends at Princeton University in 1935, an American and a German, who fly in the Thomson Trophy air races, the half-Jewish son of a Polish immigrant, and the scion of an industrial family from the Ruhr Valley are both in love with the same girl. Pressured by her parents, she marries the German who becomes an ace with the Luftwaffe while the American volunteers for the RAF.

As they become fighter enemies on opposite sides, she finds herself living the privileged life of the wife of a national war hero in Nazi Germany, drawn into secretly operating a forged document escape spy network under suspicion of the Gestapo, until they all meet again, with love, friendship and fate in the balance at the point of a machine gun trigger.