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4.0 out of 5 stars
A Most Unlikely Candidate to Help Win a War, Sep 12 2000
If you don't know about the Osprey "Aces" series, it is a set of paperback books describing in great (and sometimes arduous) detail just about every sortie and every aviator who ever shot down another in the title aircraft. Lots of little B&W photos in the margins, these books aren't for everyone. In fact, when I picked up my first few, they went unread for many months. Then, when I tired of the picture books with nothing to say and the "history" mags with their usually-uninspired writing and lack of good stories, and after I had read the same specs and summaries over and over... I re-discovered Osprey! Osprey is the motherlode... where you finally get to when your thirst for the details of the WW-II airwar can no longer be sated by the coffee-table glossies (exception: anything from the late Jeff Ethell) and the $5.00 mags from Borders. And the Wildcat is a great place to start. This was the first type to see sustained action after Pearl Harbor, mostly in the Pacific, where it performed for literally all of the war. Tillman has done some excellent research to find often first-hand information on every Wildcat ace and near ace of WW-II. He uses a chronological approach within the major Wildcat deployments: first USN/MC Pacific, then USN Europe and finally British Fleet Air Arm (FAA), with due relevance given each. Beginning on Dec 7, 1941, we see the newly-deployed Wildcat get its sea legs, through Wake Is., Midway, Guadalcanal... We see all of the major campaigns, (good and bad but mostly focusing on the positive) culminating in VJ day and the poor guy who lost it strafing a Japanese carrier deck 3 hrs before the surrender; then we see how the Wildcats were used in the ETO - knocking out some ships up in Norway, or U-boats in the north Atlantic; and finally the Brits and their "Martlet", from pre-Pearl Harbor to their General Motors-made Martlet Mk VIs near the end of the war(again), when the Wildcat is relegated to the important but ignominious task of "forward observing" for Iwo and Japan-pounding naval artillery... and still knocking bogies out of the sky to and fro the combat area. However with these Ospreys, the only vantage point is from a single type of aircraft - which you might find peculiar... some would say artificial. You certainly don't get the big picture of the war unless you read the other Ospreys of the major fighting types: Corsair and Hellcat for the Pacific; Mustang, Lightning and Thunderbolt for Europe. But this single aircraft look gives you one important perspective: that of the war as seen by these pilots and their support crew. And taken with its brethren, you can get the big picture... of the air war anyway, and all the great reading you could want from this series - and I found Tillman's Wildcat issue is right up there with a story as important and interesting as the plane itself. Definately worth 4 stars.
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