They Gave Me a Seafire (Airlife's Classics) (Paperback)

I got this as a present and may not have bought it myself. Once I got started on it my opinion was quickly changed as this is indeed one of the better military aviation books I have read.

Indeed it is worth buying just for the selection of topics covered in the Appendices - from flying the various marks of Seafire, their virtues and vices, to the fallacies of the Falklands War with respect to use of naval aviation.

The latter is a theme which runs through the book as to how the Fleet Air Arm has been mis-used and under-used in naval tactics. Reading the book and even though it is mainly concerned with the war years, it reminded me a lot of Sharky Ward's book about his Sea Harrier experiences in the Falklands War:

"Sea Harrier Over the Falklands" by Commander "Sharkey" Ward also available at Amazon.

The FAA is shown in contrast to the ways of the US Navy. The latter being the only other nation with a long continuous history of naval air arms. Here you will be able to compare and contrast approaches. This is especially the case with the different aircraft types developed for naval operations. Few books really show how bad some aircraft designs are. Too often all you get to read are the virtues. The author was clearly unimpressed with designs like the Skua or Barracuda and says so. The RN did not get into its stride until it received the US-developed and deployed Avenger and Wildcat, etc.

Not surprisingly, you will learn a great deal about what it was like to train, to fly and fight in a Seafire 'warts and all' as they say.

Anything with a pic of a Spit on the cover usually sells well. Sadly, this could be said to be overkill. Personally, I feel that there has been a disproportionate amount of attention to this aircraft. This did in a way put me off this book... "Oh no, not another twist in the seemingly inexhaustible love affair with the Spit?" How wrong can you be. I'm glad someone bought this book for me as I might have passed it by.

The use of the Spitfire in the Battle of Britain has tended to make us forget (or ignorant) of its wider use. Clearly the Spitfire was designed in the late 30s for operations from grass strips. Mitchell and his team could not have envisaged its use on bucking windswept carriers. But as comes through in time the plane itself was adaptable provided its strengths were emphasised. Sadly this was not always the case.

You can see that too often the pilots were the victim of their machines rather than the enemy. You will read of too many tragedies here with origins both from the accidental and just plain stupidity from those giving out the orders.

The book starts out almost convincing you that the Spitfire legend was unfounded. But when you read about how it was developed over its career you can only be astonished... As the author says: "it had nearly trebled its engine power and rate of climb and nearly doubled its speed. The German equivalent, the Me109, came nowhere near doing this in its equally long life span".

To conclude I would say this book is well worth the cover price for so many reasons. For example, what was it like to operate in three theatres of naval war - the Atlantic, Med and Pacific. Life during training and during combat aboard some highly improvised naval carriers. How these differed from US carriers, e.g. metal vs wooden decks. How US aircraft compared to British. How to simultaneously attack ground targets to minimise casualties from flak. How radar control and fighter direction was used and misused to defeat Luftwaffe, Japanese and Italian opponents. How the terror of the Kamikaze was beaten and what it was like to land aboard a carrier in the worst of conditions. The Merlin vs Griffon, etc. The list could go on and on.

What a shame that for all the many flying Spitfires there are around today there is not one single flying example to commemorate the bravery and perseverance of those that flew and maintained the Seafires.