Cull, Brian with Paul Sortehaug. Hurricanes over Singapore: RAF, RNZAF and NEI Fighters in Action against the Japanese over the Island and the Netherlands East Indies, 1942. London: Grub Street, 2004

ISBN 1-904010-80-6
272 pages

Acknowledgements; Foreword; Preamble; photos; maps; Select Bibliography; Index of Personnel

Appendices: Roll of Honour; Known Claims and Credits; Hurricanes Deliveries and Fates

   Brian Cull and his cohorts already tackled Buffaloes over Singapore in 2003, and that book was an extension of the original Bloody Shambles volume by Cull, Christopher Shores, and Yasuho Izawa. Now Cull and Paul Sortehaug move to another part of the same story, and they do so in the same style. As with the Buffaloes book, much of the Hurricanes book reiterates and expands Bloody Shambles. Where the original volume tended to compress and condense the recollections of the pilots who fought in the air in southeast Asia in 1941 and early 1942, Cull allows more room for the vets to fully expound their experiences. As with Buffaloes, the new book doesn't include as much in the way of context, broader themes, OBs, and so forth, but it certainly outweighs Bloody Shambles when it comes to wartime vignettes.
   For example, here's an excerpt from Cull, mostly quoting Flight Lieutenant B.J. Parker. This part of Parker's story in Bloody Shambles is reduced to a pair of third-person sentences.

   The Hurricane pilots were close to exhaustion and, when darkness came, 242 Squadron had not flown any sorties during the day; only two aircraft remained serviceable. The day also saw the last operation by Dutch fighters, one Brewster being shot down with the loss of the CO, a second being written off in a crash-landing; the Dutch also had only two fighters remaining. Meanwhile, Flt Lt Parker and his damaged Hurricane remained at Pameungpeuk:

   "I awoke early in the spare room of the Danish plantation manager near the airstrip. Apart from soreness, my back wound was not troubling me as it seemed to have been cauterised by the hot metal so I preferred to have it looked at by our own doctors in Bandoeng rather than have first aid at Pameungpeuk. I crawled into my shirt and shorts, socks, overalls and Hying boots in the darkness before washing and sitting down on the verandah until a car came for me at five o'clock. I left a thank you note for my host and a few minutes later was discussing the state of the aircraft with the Dutch fitter. He had been quite unable to repair the cable and they had nothing there with which he could replace it. He'd fixed a wooden wedge on the aileron, which he said it should hold in place. I thought to myself that I had carried out some violent manoeuvres with the damaged aircraft, flown a hundred odd miles and landed with it in no worse condition, so I'd prefer to get back to Bandoeng with it.
   Full daylight was coming as I strapped myself in as tightly as I could, lowered the seat as far as possible and locked back the cockpit canopy. There was no breeze, the engine fired easily and the mags were fine. Before he jumped down from beside the cockpit, the Dutch captain shouted to me to keep well away from Tjilatjap where there were so many Japanese aircraft about. I lowered the flaps by a third, revved up the engine and roared down the field with the gun button and gun sight switched on. In taking off, one automatically and without conscious effort compensates for any tendency in the aircraft to dip or swing out of line. Thus it was not until I was just airborne that I realised that, although I was climbing slightly, the port wing was dropping badly and I had the stick right over to its starboard stop. This was the result of the torque created by the airscrew, which is normally controlled easily enough by the ailerons but one aileron was not enough to counter it. I opened the throttle fully to increase the speed of the air over the one aileron but the effect was to disastrously increase the torque, so that I had not lifted more than 50 feet above the ground before the wings had tilted over beyond the vertical and the engine cut out. I had only a moment to see the horizon turning and revolving swiftly ahead and, looking out under the top of the upside-down windscreen, the barbed wire and machine-gun posts of the airfield perimeter flashing past below me. As always in moments of crisis, time seemed to stand still and I took my hand off the throttle and switched off the ignition.
   The violence of the crash was appalling. The port wing and the nose seemed to hit the ground almost simultaneously and the whole aircraft cartwheeled for a couple of hundred yards whilst I was helplessly strapped inside. Guns, wheels, ammunition and parts of the wings were scattered as far as 350 yards from the fuselage but the cockpit retained its integrity and I was quite uninjured for a few seconds, except for a scratch on my shin. The fuselage had come to rest facing the direction opposite that of my take-off and I found myself with the gravity tank almost in my lap and petrol splashing out through the bottom. I was hardly aware of this before I was struck on the head by the rudder pin and stunned. The back of the aircraft had been broken and the tail unit had fallen on to the cockpit. I pulled myself together again, pushed the stick and petrol tank aside, clambered out of the cockpit and picked up my parachute. Several Dutch officers, who hurtled down the airstrip in a car, were surprised to see me emerge from the dust and they congratulated me on a remarkable escape. They organised an old Chevrolet car with a Dutch sergeant as driver to take me to Bandoeng, which we reached about noon.
   The town was in chaos, the Japanese ground troops being fairly close, and I found the Squadron had been moved to a small airstrip near Tasikmalaja, rather further to the east. There was a lot of traffic on the roads but we got there in the late afternoon and the sergeant, instead of taking me to the airfield, left me where the pilots were billeted. They had been unable to contact Pameungpeuk and it had generally been assumed on the previous afternoon that I was dead. Taffy had landed all right at Andir and at the time of my arrival at Tasikmalaja was round at Air HQ in the town. An RAF doctor came round to see me at the billet after dark and I lay on a bamboo frame whilst he dug out the bits of metal in my back under local anaesthetic. There was no electricity so Mike held a torch at various angles under the doctor's direction until he was unable to avoid being sick and somebody else took over. The bits had gone quite a long way in and I was very lucky that they had not hit my spine.
   Taffy came back with the news that the British troops near Tasik, mostly 5,000 RAF men with a couple of battalions of Australians and some anti-aircraft gunners, would form a guerrilla force in the hills of southern Java and try to hold out long enough to hope for escape by sea and to maintain some resistance. The Dutch intended to surrender on the following day, and at daybreak, our last two Hurricanes were to survey the road to the south-west up which I'd travelled a few hours earlier to ensure that the would-be guerrilla force could get through and that the Japs were not near it.
   We visited the remains of my Hurricane, which impressed the other pilots, and the Danish plantation manager, whose anxiety had increased considerably, and who talked of a menacing future. His workforce had become very unsettled since the news of the Dutch capitulation had come through and he had to reconsider his whole work schedules. I needed a rest badly and at first I was very relieved that the fighting was over. During the previous seven weeks I'd flown more than anybody in the remnants of the two 232 Squadrons - as much as eight hours in a day sometimes - and the strain right from our disastrous first day had been most severe. Of the original ten officer pilots I was the only one left after the first two weeks and was astonished I had survived so long. In addition to the aerial combat there had been the several days of strafing troops and convoys on the roads and in barges and I'd been involved in four crashes."

   The wartime stories are without exception endlessly fascinating, particularly those set in the Netherlands East Indies which continues to be one of the under-reported fronts of the war. The relatively lengthy pieces included here on the absolutely futile Allied resistance in and around Java make for grim but strongly evocative reading.
   Very much recommended to anyone who loves the tales of veteran fighter pilots as well as anyone interested in this corner of the war.

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Manrho, John and Ron Putz. Bodenplatte: The Luftwaffe's Last Hope: The Attack on Allied Airfields, New Year's Day 1945. Crowborough, UK: Hikoki Publications, 2004

ISBN 1-902109-40-6
304 pages

Introduction; Acknowledgements; Glossary; photos; maps; Index

Twelve appendices

   Operation Bodenplatte was the Luftwaffe's surprise attack on Allied aircraft at airfields in the West early on New Year's Day 1945. Conceived as a daring stroke to catch the enemy planes while on the ground and at their most vulnerable, the Luftwaffe's raids caused considerable damage, but at considerable cost. The same story has been told in some detail previously, notably Battle of the Airfields: Operation Bodenplatte, 1 January 1945 by Norman Franks.
   While the book by Franks was perfectly adequate, Manrho and Putz take the story to another level with considerably more nuance about the operations as well as numerous photos and extensive appendices with a wealth of data covering OBs, strength reports, losses, claims, etc. The heart of the book, however, comprises eleven of the thirteen chapters dealing with assaults by one or more Luftwaffe units on specific airbases. The authors provide a great deal of information from Allied and German perspectives, all supplemented by the stories of individual airmen along with their personal recollections.
   Here's an example of a typical part of one chapter:

   Before reaching Eindhoven, I. Gruppe also suffered a casualty. Fhr. Friedrich Tazreiter's 'Green 6' was hit in the engine by light AAA. His aircraft crashed near Eindhoven airfield. He remembers: "I baled out at very low altitude and I think an angel saved my life. After much consideration I believe the parachute opened at the same time as I fell in a fir tree. When I regained consciousness I was hanging in this tree a few centimetres above the frozen ground. I released my parachute and wanted to get one of my boots, which was lying some metres away. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my right foot. After a few minutes my whole body began to ache. Later, it was established that I had broken two bones in my right foot, bruised my spinal column and right shoulder and had concussion. After some time, Dutch civilians spotted me and returned with a policeman who handed me over to British soldiers."
   At the same time as Lt. Jung's aircraft had gone down, Uffz. Erich Miedl of the Stabsschwarm, who was flying on his wing, saw Major Bar overtaking the formation on the right. Immediately Miedl and his Rottenfuhrer, Ofw. Leo Schuhmacher, tried to catch up with him, pushing their Fw 190 A-9s to the limit. They succeeded in doing this and following their Kommodore, they were the first to arrive over Eindhoven, even before the first Schwarm of IV./JG 3, which they also had overtaken. Flying a left hand turn, Major Bar aimed at two "Tempests" which were taking off and shot them down—his 204th and 205th claims. Both were later confirmed as Typhoons.
   The two Typhoons belonged to a group of eight aircraft from No. 438 Squadron, which had just started their take-off run. The leader, 31-year old F/Lt. Pete Wilson, who had just been appointed squadron commander, was in one of the two aircraft in the take-off run. He throttled back and pulled to the side of the runway where he climbed out of the aircraft. He had suffered a gunshot wound in the lower stomach and died a few minutes after admittance to Sick Quarters. The pilot of No. 2 aircraft, F/0 Ross Keller, became airborne but either he or the aircraft was hit. There were no eyewitnesses as to what had happened, but he was later found in his burnt aircraft in which he had attempted a forced landing just off the aerodrome.
   By now the full armada of JG 3 was over Eindhoven. The leading Schwarm of IV./JG 3 consisting of Muller, Bosch, Pusch and Leipholz had closely followed Major Bar and the two Stabsschwarm pilots. The Sturmgruppe arrived over Eindhoven airfield without losses during the outward flight. After a few minutes the Messerschmitts of I. and III./JG 3 followed them.

   Without denigrating the Franks book, it's clear that this impressive work from Hikoki represents the state of the art when it comes to information about Bodenplatte. Good job.

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Nauroth, Holger. Jagdgeschwader 2 Richthofen: A Photographic History. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 2004

ISBN 0-7643-2094-7
350 pages

Acknowledgments; photos; Epilogue; Bibliography

Appendix: Unit leaders

   Although billed as a photographic history, Nauroth's book is actually quite a bit more than that. Each chapter covers a different deployment of the geschwader:

• Creation of JG 2
• Poland and France
• Battle of Britain
• Air defense in the West
• North Africa
• The end of the war
• Post-WWII service

   As promised, each chapter contains numerous photos of the unit's personnel and aircraft on the ground and in action, as well as many interesting and unusual photos such as the "Udet buoys" scattered in the English Channel to save downed pilots during the Battle of Britain. More than that, though, each chapter also begins with a chronological survey of the unit. Here's an example:

5 November 1942
The 11. Staffel moves to Sicily, where it is attached to JG 53 "Pik As". The Staffel later leaves JG 2.

8-12 November 1942
The US Army lands in Morocco and Algeria in the rear of the German Africa Corps. In response the Wehrmacht occupies all of France. Several units of JG 2 are moved to the south of France to guard the Mediterranean coast against American bombers and help repel a possible invasion.

9 November 1942
The Stab and I. Gruppe transfer to Marseille-Merignane, two Staffeln of the III. Gruppe to Bourges and the 10. Staffel to Istres. There is no contact with the enemy.

13 November 1942
An advance party is sent to Italy by rail.

November 1942
The II. Gruppe also receives transfer orders. It is transferred to San Pietro in Sicily.

17 November 1942
The II. Gruppe arrives in San Pietro, where its role is to provide air cover for supply transports to Africa.

26 November 1942
The II. Gruppe moves to North Africa.

15 December 1942
The II. Gruppe has arrived in North Africa. In spite of the changes [sic] conditions, pilots and ground crews soon acclimatize to the new theater of war.

December 1942 - March 1943
Hauptmann Buhligen is one of the pilots who adapts quickly to the changed operational environment. He becomes the Richthofen Geschwader's most successful pilots [sic] in Africa. The II. Gruppe is the only Luftwaffe fighter unit to operate the Focke-Wulf in Africa. [sic]

2 February 1943
Oberleutnant Erich Rudorffer, Staffelkapitan of 6./JG 2, shoots down eight enemy aircraft over the Tunisian front.

3 February 1943
Kurt Buhligen scores his fiftieth victory. The II. Gruppe operates over Bizerte, Tebessa, Souk el Arab and Kairouan. The 11. Staffel commanded by Leutnant Julius Meimberg becomes part of JG 53.

15 February 1943
Oberleutnant Rudorffer shoots down seven enemy aircraft.

17 March 1943
The II. Gruppe moves back to Beaumont-le-Roger. There it reequips with the Bf 109 G.

12 May 1943
Army Group Africa, commanded by Generaloberst von Arnim surrenders. Von Arnim had assumed command from Generalfeldmarschall Rommel on 9 March 1943.

   It's interesting to note, by the way, that the operations of II/JG 2 in North Africa were also recently covered in Focke-Wulf Fw 190 in North Africa by Arthy and Jessen. By comparison, Nauroth includes one chapter with two pages of chronology and ten pages of photos with captions concerning II. Gruppe in Africa during 1942-1943. Arthy and Jessen write three chapters about II/JG 2 in Africa, amounting to more than fifty pages and including much more detailed chronologies but not nearly so many photos. Despite Nauroth's claim that II/JG 2 was the only Luftwaffe formation flying Focke-Wulf's in Africa, Arthy and Jessen also show that was not actually the case.
   Jagdgeschwader 2 Richthofen will without a doubt appeal most to those interested in black and white snapshots of Luftwaffe aircraft and personnel in a wide variety of day to day activities.

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Maslov, Mikhail. Tupolev SB Soviet High Speed Bomber. Columbia, IA: Icarus Aviation Press, 2004

ISBN 0-9724527-1-0
224 pages

Abbreviations; Acknowledgments; Geographical Names; Introduction; photos; diagrams; tables; color profiles; Sources and Literature; Scale Drawings; Colors and Markings

   Unlike the other three books surveyed here, this one is the complete technical and operational history of a specific aircraft. It also comes from Icarus Aviation Press, a publisher not previously familiar to us. If Tupolev SB is a reliable indication of what Icarus can do, then we should be seeing some more high quality books from Iowa.
   Although the publisher is based in Iowa, the book was apparently written originally in Russian (the Preface thanks the translator) and it was printed and bound in Moscow. Further, Maslov indicates he spent a great deal of time in Russian archives and gathering memoirs of Soviet designers, engineers, and pilots. Indeed, "...the author [was required to] reconsider and question everything written and published [about the SB] prior to the 1990s." The fruit of so much work is a solid, fact-filled tome that certainly seems to stand out as the most thorough English-language work on the aircraft.
   The bulk of the book covers design and development of the SB with details of prototypes, production problems, engines, improved versions, experimental work, and the post-war years. Chapters also cover colors and markings, the Ar-2 dive bomber variant, the SB in civil service, and SBs in the service of China, Czechoslovakia, and Finland. About twenty-five pages are devoted to technical descriptions and illustrations (some from the original manuals) of the aircraft and its components with dozens of scale drawings and color profiles including Spanish, Chinese, Finnish, Czechoslovakian, Luftwaffe, and Soviet markings.
   Operations are not forgotten. A section amounting to about sixty pages covers the SB in the Spanish Civil War, in combat against the Japanese, in China, during the Winter War, and during the Great Patriotic War.
   Here's a sample of what Maslov writes about the SB in action:

   The Western Special Military District (later renamed Western Front) Air Force, covering 470 km (290 miles) of the border from Grodno to Brest, sustained the heaviest attacks by the Germans. Twenty-six airfields were attacked at dawn on 22 June, after which air engagements and attacks on airfields continued throughout the day.
   During the first day of war the Germans carried out four air strikes against the airfield of the 39th SBAP (10th SAD, Smeshannaya Aviadiviuya or Combined Aviation Division), positioned to the west of Pinsk. Despite its losses, 18 SBs of the 39th Regiment managed to take off after the first attack and at about 07:00 hours attacked German tanks and motorized units crossing the Bug River. They reported hitting the crossing point and German units. However, the relative success of this desperate attack, carried out without fighter cover, was achieved at a high price. According to German sources, all 18 bombers were shot down on their way back. Thus, on the first day of combat operations the 39th SBAP lost all 43 of its SBs and five Pe-2s.
   On 22 June the ill luck of the 39th Aviation Regiment was repeated by the 6th, 128th, 24th, 121st, 125th, and 130th Bomber Aviation Regiments of the Western Front. Many airplanes, openly parked at the airfields, were burnt on the ground. The few and poorly organized combat sorties by the Soviet bombers were carried out without fighter cover, also resulting in heavy losses.
   By two weeks later most of the Western Front's air power was lost, and by 10 July 1941 only 389 airplanes, including 72 SBs and twelve Ar-2s, remained in service with the Red Army Air Force in this district.

   The entire book is illustrated with more than three hundred photographs: interiors, exteriors, in flight, on the ground, and wrecked, all from every imaginable angle.
   Quite a nice job, and perhaps a harbinger of more equally interesting volumes to come from Icarus. Definitely worth a look.

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   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from the publishers.
   Thanks to the publishers for providing these review copies.