Picked this up inexpensively at Amazon Kindle. I enjoy books about WWII, especially around aviation and the naval air campaigns. This is an unusual book in it’s about the FAA (Britain’s naval ‘Fleet Air Arm’ - in other words carrier based aircraft) and the Seafire - the naval adaptation of the well know Spitfire.

I hadn’t heard about the author Mike Crosley - who served in combat pretty continuously from 1941 to the end in the Japanese invasion campaign. He flew Sea hurricanes and then Seafires and rarely the US carrier fighters such as the Corsair. FAA pilots were not rotated off combat as was the RAF and the USAAF and Navy air crews.

An impressively written book which I devoured including the, normally ignored, appendices. An exceptional pilot, if not one of the top aces, who went on after the war to invent the HUD (Heads Up Display) in 1949.

What though came out as a profound shock to me was the indifference of the ‘lords’ (the British admirals) to its carriers and pilots, how they were mired in WWI ‘big-gun’ thinking, and the sheer incompetence of the RN. Inexplicably the gunships couldn’t adequately use radio to the spotting aircraft, targets often completely missed, often no way to communicate between carriers, no joint planning and reviews of strikes and so on.

The British aircraft were generally useless except for the Hurricane and, eventually, the Seafire. The Seafire’s antecedent the Spitfire was a magnificent short range fighter and this latter legacy not helpful for operations over sea and longer range. What I didn’t realize was how effective it became as a longish range attack fighter - even flying completely across Japan to perform ground harbour and airfield attacks,

Compounding the inadequacy of the British shipboard attack aircraft all the aircraft were fragile and unreliable and for more aircrew dies for this reason than enemy action. Many also died in landing patterns from their own anti-aircraft fire!

Mike’s major campaigns were n the Mediterranean, essentially supporting Malta - probably the largest fighter campaigns of WWII, and in the Pacific supporting the invasion of Japan.
A wonderful read. ( )

Rather a mixed bag with exciting stories of aerial combat alternating with the usual first person narratives of drunken sprees, profiles of friends and enemies and a lot of the mundane stuff of life, like lousy food and lots of tussles with authority. Indeed, the book provides a number of examples of the typical British "lions led by donkeys" way of combat. And the book winds up with numerous appendices of aircraft performance, accident reports and the author's evaluation of why the lessons of WW2 were forgotten and had to be relearned in the Falklands War. ( )