Book Reviews

I asked to review this book as I had spent some time on Bougainville in 1997 as part of the ANZAC Truce Monitoring Force and recall the island being littered with aircraft wrecks and other detritus of WW2. Another of Osprey's excellent Air Campaign series, Operation Ro-Go is a detailed account of the failure of Imperial Japan's attempt to take the offensive in the Solomons theater of the Pacific War, but which in turn became Japan's first line of defense against the Allies' Rabaul raids and Bougainville landings. If anything the tagline should be 'Japanese air power fails to tackle the Bougainville landings'! By 1943, Japan was on the defensive in the Pacific. By the end of that year, after punishing aerial combat in the skies above...

Roland White probably needs no introduction as an author of fast paced aviation histories. This, I hoped, was no exception. I was not disappointed. This book weaves together the stories of the Mosquito, the airmen who flew them and the resistance movement in Denmark. There is plenty of detail which shows good research and enables the characters to be well drawn. Not just military uses of the Mosquito, BOAC used them to fly into Sweden for various reasons. While some of the stories will be familiar, there are several strands to this book and all of them together lead to a gripping narrative which unfolds chronologically over three parts and 480 pages ending with Operation Carthage in Copenhagen, and it’s aftermath. A brilliant...

P-38 Lightning vs Bf 109 is from Osprey and is part of their Duel series. Written by Edward M. Young, it covers the aerial combats between the two fighters over North Africa, Sicily and Italy in 1942-43. Once again, Osprey has exposed gaps in my knowledge. Like so many British people, what I know of the air war in this area and over this time is focused on the RAF, and specifically the Desert Air Force, fighting the Luftwaffe rather than the American part of the battle. What Young writes about is the arrival of the P-38s in North Africa after Operation Torch, their tasks escorting US bomber missions and their fight against the Luftwaffe's Bf 109. The author takes the reader through the design and development of both aircraft. He...

Number 4 in the Osprey “Fleet” series, the full title of this book is “US Seventh Fleet, Vietnam 1964-75 - American Naval Power in Southeast Asia” and once again for an Osprey campaign book, it does exactly what it says on the tin. The author is a naval historian who’s concentrated on detailing the US Navy experience in Vietnam, and this shines clearly throughout the book. Whilst the first image which comes to mind for most of us considering US Navy in Vietnam is jets flying off carriers, there was a lot more going on than just that; most notably blockading, intelligence gathering, naval gunfire support, interdiction of NVA vessels, and amphibious assault ops. This book gives a rounded precis of eleven years of Naval operations without...

The copy i reviewed was in electronic format and is the first electronic version I have had that I think would have been better in hard copy. he electronic version doesn’t have the illustrations and in hard copy it would have been easier to flip back and confirm previous parts of the book which may have made it easier to read. The author was an associate of Boris Berezovsky and a friend of Alexander Litvenenko. He is very passionate about the case and frustrated in its outcome. He has a wealth of knowledge about the case and this is reflected in the morass of detail in the antecedents going back in some cases decades prior to the murder, covering who attended what meeting, who was a protege of whom and detailed background on a large...

Another offering from the pen of Ian Baxter, written for the Pen & Sword publishers in their Images of War series. The book was published in 2023 and is the 60th title by Ian Baxter. Ian Baxter is an author and photographic collector whose books draw an increasing following. Among his many previous titles in the Images of War Series are Hitler’s Boy Soldiers, Nazi Concentration Camp Commandants, The Ghettos of Nazi Occupied Poland, German Army on the Eastern Front – The Advance, German Army on the Eastern Front – The Retreat, The Crushing of Army Group (North) and the SS Waffen Division series including SS Leibstandarte Division, SS Totenkopf Division At War, Waffen SS of the Baltic States, Waffen SS at Arnhem and Waffen SS in the...

Hans Seidler is an enthusiastic collector of WW2 memorabilia and an authority on German formations and equipment. He has many titles in print with Pen & Sword's Images of War series including; Hitler's Tank Killer - Stürmgeschutze at War 1940-1945, Battle of Kursk, Luftwaffe Flak & Field Divisions 1939-1945, and German Machine Guns of the Second World War Hitler's Artillery 1939 – 1945 is a highly illustrated record of the fire power of the German war machine between 1939 – 1945. Many of the photographs, all from the author's collection, come originally from the albums of individuals who took part in the war. The images and narrative cover the guns in service with the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS and provide a unique visual record of...

This is a big book, and not just because it has over 520 pages, or that it measures around 12” x 10” in size and weighs a hefty 3kg, it’s big because it’s absolutely jam packed full of information relating to this iconic aircraft. This book is an upgrade from the authors first book published in 1986 and despite that being an incredible read, there were gaps. In 2016 the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) released a raft of previously classified information and Crickmore has added that information to this book. It would be a straightforward enough exercise to research and publish a dull, data driven book with all the technical points and record-breaking statistics that surround the SR71, this information has been in the public...

I almost (only almost) wish I had read this book before reading Fighting With The Long Range Desert Group (also by Brendan O’Carroll), because I would seen the overall picture before reading about one person’s service. In some 250 pages Brendan O’Carroll has written about the Long Range Desert Group, (referred to as the LDRG) in North Africa with a considerable number of photographs taken by those involved themselves, and not by some professional photographer. He starts with an Acknowledgements page of thanks to those involved in providing stories/restoration/writing this book and lists far more people and organisations than I have room for here. In the Introduction the author makes it quite clear that the purpose was to tell the...