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If you are a real history buff of the Pacific War Theatre you will get thru it but I found it heavy going. A map accompanying the text showing all the locations of the battles etc would have given the text much more context. The part I enjoyed most was in early in the book where Tom explained his leadership philosphies at the time of creating the squadrons that many modern managers could take note of in terms of how to create a high performance team. Tom was obviousily a great pilot but writing is a different skill set. The book was technically well set out but tended to just be a historical/chronological account of the day by day squadron activities that all started to sound the same after a while.
Lots of information on the Corsair airplane and fighting in a Corsair squadron. A very good book.
It leaves the overrated and rascist GOD IS MY CO-PILOT miles behind.In narrating the story of VF-17, Blackburn paints a great picture of how things were in NAval aviation in WW II.Great book. Amazing. Fast-paced, energetic, even sensible at times, THE JOLLY ROGERS is the best autobiography ever written about fighter combat in the Pacific.
Again, that would have been interesting subject to explore, but again no explanation or analysis. On the last page of the book in the epilogue he says that he latter rose to command a carrier but then navy asked him to retire because "the navy didn't need a captain who couldn't handle his liquor". Then the book ends practically right at that sentence. Kind of boring. The book was kind of lame, but the picture on the front did get me thinking about building the 1/32 scale corsair model so all was not lost.for a better account of WWII combat in the air over the pacific, read Saburo Sakai's "Samurai", or Samuel Hynes "Flights of Passage", or "Aces Against Japan" all much better books. For example, he states that he and several of his guys shot at any Japanese pilot they could find floating in a parachute, no analysis or explanation provided. He glosses over a lot of stuff that could be good reading real non-chalantly without any explanation. This would have been an interesting topic to hear more about.
The book does not have the grand sweep of an Ambrose book covering a whole theater, but still does a good job at retelling this piece of aviation history. Tom Blackburn's account of VF-17 in World War II does a better job at making a reader feel like they are involved in the scenery of air combat than does Greg "Pappy" Boyington's Baa Baa Black Sheep. Overall, I was much more entertained, but still came away wanting more than was given.
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