Customer Reviews

Achtung! Moskito!: RAF and USAAF Mosquito Fighters, Fighter-Bombers, and Bombers over the Third Reich 1941-1945

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Mr Bowman is a prolific Mosquito and 2 Group RAF author. I have a dozen of his titles. There is so much content to recommend this latest. It really is a treasure for Mosquito fans. Each chapter has lots of first person narrative. There are lots of photographs, many I had not seen before. Most of these new photos were squadron "line up" photographs of pilots and navigators/observers. Interestingly, the first chapter, "Low Levellers and Shallow Raiders," happens to be a verbatim duplicate of the first chapter "Down Low," in Mr Bowman's Mosquito: Menacing the Reich published by Pen & Sword. Likewise chapter eleven, "Mosquitopanik," is essentially the same as chapter six, "Mosquitopanik," from Bowman's book Mosquitopanik also published by Pen & Sword. I appreciate the Mosquito kill chronology, updated from Martin Sharp's & Michael Bowyer's excellent 1995 edition of Mosquito published by Crecy. There is a nice appendix covering squadron assignments. I wish there was a chronology of Mossie squadrons by command (Bomber, Coastal, Fighter) as each converted or became operational.
The only reason this is not a five star review is the publisher's workmanship, the binding. This hefty book is 480 pages long and poorly bound. The heavy, glossy paper is typical of Schiffer books. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the book is too heavy for the binding. I discarded my amazon receipt before experiencing structural failure of the spine and endsheet peeling away from the back cover. My abuse? Merely placing the book on a table and opening it in the middle. As a comparison, Boiten & Bowman's Battles with the Nachtjagd (also by Schiffer) is the same thickness, but only 348 pages (same format size) and printed on lighter non-glossy paper. It suffers none of the binding defects of Achtung Moskito! You won't be taking this to read on an airplane, it's just too darn heavy, and fragile.

What, another Mosquito book? Yes, and a big, heavy one! While this is again a narrative of the Mossie's well-known service history, this time it is mainly told through the writings of the aircrews; Bowman's text mainly ties these reminiscences together, weaving a colorful story. Chapters deal with different missions and/or different theaters, and there is a chapter about USAAF operations. Photos seem to be often of the "never before published" variety, but rather unforgivably for a book this large and expensive, they are generally too small and printed with excessive contrast. There is a 12-page color gallery, but those photos are too small as well. A number of appendices include an interesting listing of all Mosquito air-to-air kills, and a woefully-incomplete list of variants, which omits all of the bomber and P.R. versions! But this is an entertaining read and is worthy of purchasing if the book's size and price are not off-putting.