Mustang

The most deserving candidate to the title 'Best Fighter Aircraft of the Second World War' is the North American Mustang. No other embodied so many of the desirable characteristics that gave a pilot advantage over his adversaries in whichever corner of the sky they were engaged. The Mustang's contribution to Allied victory was considerable in that it became the prime vehicle in the attainment of air superiority over enemy territory. A certain romance surrounds its history from conception to fulfilment: born and bred for the British in an American stable, the Mustang reached the zenith of its career after saddling to the Packard version of the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. Despite the advent of the jet aircraft the Mustang went into action again at the start of the Korean War in 1950. A final measure of this fighter's worth is its survival in the service of small nation air forces 30 years after the Second World War.
This book gives an appraisal of the Mustang throughout the significant stages of its history and records opinions and recollections of people who built, flew and maintained this remarkable fighter. The text is largely an attempt to convey to the reader the intrinsic qualities the aircraft was deemed to have by those who knew it well. Specifications and tabulated data are not included. With some 45,000 words and 200 photographs—most previously unpublished and including colour —the author covers the Mustang at war from the first little known single sortie over France in May 1942, through the fighter-reconnaissance and fighter-bomber employment by British, Canadian and American squadrons, its development as the long-range fighter saviour of the US daylight bombers and subsequent service in many theatres of war—wave-top escorts over the icy North Sea to Norway, rocket busting forays along the Adriatic coast, nine hour missions to Japan across the vast Pacific—to the last large scale operations among the treacherous Korean mountains a decade later. Many of the accounts are firsthand from Americans, British, Canadians, Poles and South Africans who knew the Mustang at war.


by Roger A. Freeman
Published by Ian Allan 1974 1st edition 160pp boards slightly bowed, otherwise very good, spine of d/j slightly faded.


***signed and inscribed by the Author***

***also signed on page 100 by Urban Drew*** Drew shot down 2 Me262's on 7th October 1944


See signatures.....



Note:
"Long" descriptions, where shown, may have been taken from the book's dust jacket notes, and as such are relevant to the date of publication (e.g. any references to "new edition" "previously unpublished photographs" etc.) and not the present.