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148crew, aircraft number (where known) and brief remarks, usuallyincluding the identity of the aircrew saved. Finally, there is an index toall personalities mentioned in the text, permitting one to find more detailon a specific incident.It is easy to overlook, but an ASR capability was, and it still is, animportant component of a balanced air force. This was a story that waslong overdue for telling and this book tells it well.CGJDog-Fight by Norman Franks. Greenhill Books; 2003. %u00a318.99Paradoxically, rather than fading into obscurity with the passage oftime, our understanding of the first war in the air is probably clearertoday than at any time in the past. In terms of fighter pilots%u2019 %u2018scores%u2019, forinstance, early aviation writers appear to have been content to accept atface value the wartime victory tallies that had been credited to the %u2018aces%u2019;although this may be selling them short, because they could do little else.Until the Fifty Year Rule was reduced to a mere thirty in 1968, the deadhand of British bureaucracy maintained a tight grip on information aspotentially damaging to national security as the combat reports submittedby the pilots of Sopwith Camels in 1918. Since then, however, with theopening of archives here and elsewhere, a great deal of work has beendone to establish what really happened in the skies over France duringWW I. Norman Franks has been at the forefront of this effort for manyyears and, so far as the exploits of the fighter pilots of the day areconcerned, he is one of the most prolific of British writers in the field.There is only so much original material to work with, of course, andmuch of the factual information inevitably tends to be recycled frombook to book. In search of a sharper focus, the author%u2019s latest effort issubtitled Aerial Tactics of the Aces of World War I. The attempt toprovide a theme has not, I think, been entirely successful because of theway in which the book has been organised. Rather than tracing theevolution of aerial tactics and fighting techniques, and illustratingprogress by citing examples, the emphasis is reversed and what we areactually presented with is more of a series of accounts of whatrepresentative pilots did at various times and of how they did it.That is not to say that there are no references to the progressivedevelopment of tactics; they are certainly there, but the evolving pictureis not as clearly drawn as it might have been and some aspects are not