Customer Reviews

War Wings: The United States and Chinese Military Aviation, 1929-1949 (Contributions in Military Studies)

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Xu has written a very valuable book for students of the air war in Asia in the 1930s. I wish I'd had a copy in front of me when I was writing Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942. Not only is Xu a native reader of Mandarin and Cantonese, but he spent years ransacking the various archives in the United States. (The research began as a doctoral dissertation, but continued well beyond that.) The result is a study unmatched in English of the American role in Chinese aviation during the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s.

Alas, the book is very hard to find and priced out of sight. Even the Kindle edition (available on Amazon) is beyond the reach of most people interested in this subject. I recommend inter-library loan, which is how I acquired my copy.

Though Xu is a fluent writer of academic English, he is not well versed in military aviation, and his references to actual warplanes and aerial combats are often confused and sometimes just plain wrong. This is inevitable when contemporary documetns (themselves often written by people without technical knowledge) are used without applying a filter of prior information. Still, "War Wings" belongs on the shelf of every serious student of the Sino-Japanese War and the American Volunteer Group.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford