Reading for January 2009.

Happy New Year all!

I just finished perusing The Imperial Russian Air Service, you don't really read it (B+/A-). I was also doing some reading about the French Armee de L'Air late last year, in the form of the H&C booklets French Aircraft, 1939-1942 (A) and the Mushroom Model Publication "Potez 63 Family" (A).

Not strictly air combat reading, but I'm about 1/4 through The Battle of Leyte Gulf : The Death Knell of the Japanese Fleet.

I'm slowly working through Boots Blesse's autobiography, as well as a few non-aviation books I got for Christmas.

Just finished Günther Rall's My Logbook: Reminiscences 1938-2006. Highly recommended.

Finished Spitfire: A Test Pilot's Story by Jeffrey Quill over Christmas (while waiting for a flight out of a snowed-in Vancouver airport!) and really enjoyed it. Sigh for a Merlin by Alex Henshaw is next in line after a non-aviation fiction book.

>5 rfodchuk:
That one has been piquing me for awhile now; think I'll officially resolve to read it this year.

I read both Spitfire and Sigh when they first came out. Both impressed me as well written and different from the run of the mill. They show different sides of the effort to produce the Spitfire for the front line. Quill's book centers on the development of the design, whilst Henshaw was a production test pilot par excellence. Both fascinating and well worth reading - might just go back to them myself. Thanks for the reminder.

Just finished up "Red Eagles," which seems to be a good account of the USAF unit formed to exploit Soviet fighter planes for tactical training; heavy on the stupid fighter pilot tricks and white-knuckle moments in the cockpit, the book could have been a little stronger in terms of analyzing the evolution of the organization. Then again, when I think about it, that the author collected as much information as he did is pretty amazing.

Hopefully this isn't too OT, but I'd like to recommend a documentary I watched on DVD this weekend, called "Hurricane R4118".

It was great... the restorers found a Hawker Hurricane Mk I as a wreck at an Indian technical university. They traced the plane's serial numbers and discovered that it had participated in the Battle of Britain. The restoration team took it to bits, cleaned all the bits, sent the engine off to Rolls Royce to be refurbished, put all the bits back together, then flew it. Beeeeeyooootiful restoration job. They were able to use something like 85% to 90% of the plane's original parts. The engine was in surprisingly good shape, experiencing remarkably little corrosion or damage due to being tightly sealed.

Aha, I can relate it to a book! Hurricane R4118: The Great Battle of Britain Survivor by Peter Vacher. Guess I know what my next purchase will be. ;-)

If anyone is interested in the DVD, let me know and I can email the distributor's site to you. I don't work for 'em, I just really enjoyed the documentary.

9, anyone interested in a first person story about warbird restoration might enjoy Black 6: The Extraordinary Restoration of a Messerschmitt Bf 109. The author spent countless hours restoring the 109 and then fought all sorts of wranglings over who actually would get to keep it.

I'm reading one that is hard to find; FIGHTER OVER FINLAND, the Memoirs of a Fighter Pilot by Eino Luukkanen translated from the Finnish by Mauno A. Salo and published in Great Britain by McDonald & Co. in 1963. The title in Finnish was 'HAVITTAJALENTAJANA KAHDESSA SODASSA'. The pilot first flew combat missions against the Russians when they invaded Finland in October of 1939, and then after Germany invaded Russia in June of 1940 they held the line to keep the Russians from turning the German Left Flank during the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). The number of aerial victories achieved by the Finnish pilots was astounding. Joppe Karhunen scored 31 kills, the author scored 54, Hasse Wind had 78 and Eino Juutilainen shot down 94. The Russians undertrained their pilots such that it was just a waste of equipment to send them on combat missions against the Finns. This volume also has an extensive review, with drawings, of all the types of combat aircraft used by both the Finns and the Russians.

I read online the other day that the single fighter plane that had shot down the most planes, ever (40+, if I remember right), was a Finnish . . . Brewster Buffalo. It just seems so wrong, doesn't it?

Just finished yesterday the Time-Life oldie "Fall of Japan." Never new that two Japanese aircraft flew in and near the two Atomic Bombs explosions. Having read several books on this topic over years I found this book a very good overall book on the subject.
German

I'm just finishing Air Raid--Pearl Harbor!: The Story of December 7, 1941. It says for ages 10-14, which I hadn't noticed until I bought it. It was still an interesting read with some details I had either forgotten or never knew, so it was still worth every penny of the 75¢ I paid for it.

Have just finished 'THEY SAILED THE SKIES: U.S. Navy Balloons and the Airship Program' by J.Gordon Vaeth.
During WWII the U.S. Navy operated over two hundred airships for patrol and convoy protection.
Their purpose was a much for deterrence as defense. They caused enemy U-boats to remain submerged at too great a distance to attack a convoy, and remain so until dark allowed them to run on the surface to recharge batteries and try to get ahead of the convoy. This delayed their attack for another day and gave the convoy a chance to vanish.
If the submarine was detected by the airship, a destroyer could be dispatched to locate the sub with sonar and attack it with depth bombs. The British were very successful in sinking U-boats by this method. It also kept them away from the convoy.
One airship violated Orders and attacked a U-boat with it's .50-cal. machine gun. It damaged the sub's flotation tanks but was destroyed by the 20 mm fire from the U-boat. One airshipman was killed, but the sub was destroyed by patrol bombers before it could reach it's home base. Airships were also valuable in recovering survivors lost at sea.
Say what you will, anyone floating alone in the middle of the ocean was happy beyond measure to see an airship or flying-boat come to the rescue.

Jim,
Is this the same as Blimps & U-Boats: U.S. Navy Airships in the Battle of the Atlantic also by Vaeth?