Page 156 - Demo

156Gp Capt Jock HeronA Separate Little War by Andrew D Bird. Grub Street; 2003. %u00a318.99The war in question was the one fought by the Banff Strike Wing in1944-45. It was certainly %u2018separate%u2019, in that it tended to be conducted inrelative isolation and with little attendant publicity, but %u2018little%u2019 belies thesurprising scale of the anti-shipping campaign fought in Scandinavianwaters, as it routinely involved formations of sixty aeroplanes and oftenmany more. Because such operations were often mounted jointly, thenarrative also covers much of the activity conducted by the DallachyWing, the dedicated Mustang escort squadrons based at Peterhead andthe ASR Warwicks detached to fly in support.The story draws heavily upon the facts and figures provided by therelevant Operations Record Books, amplified by the customaryrecollections of eye-witnesses and participants. So long as the authorstays within the bounds set by these sources, the book provides whatappears to be a convincingly accurate account of what went on, althoughI do have some reservations about an anecdote in which the contributorrecalls having spent 30 minutes at the controls of a Mosquito VI whileflying as a passenger during a delivery flight in 1945 %u2013 although one istempted to fantasise about the opportunities presented to him as a teenaged ATC cadet in the course of swapping seats with a female ATApilot. While that particular tale may be a little hard to swallow in itsentirety, it was clearly not actually concocted by the book%u2019s author;nevertheless one%u2019s confidence in his writing is somewhat undermined bythe many minor errors which hint at significant gaps in his basicknowledge of the RAF and/or of geography. For instance, Aarhus is not,as the author states (p160), on the west coast of Denmark and theaccount of an action fought in the vicinity of %u00c5lesund on 7 December1944 (p64) simply cannot be related to a map of the area. Then again wehave Ossington aerodrome presented as Ossingham, Crimond asCrimmond, Lerwick as Lervick, Edzell as Edzall and Donibristle asDonnybristle. It is possible, of course, that some of these are merelytypos, because there are plenty more of those, eg bead (for head), ADBG(for ADGB), scrapped (for scraped), Consul (for Consol), accessing (forassessing), Butles (for Butler), expedited (for expended) and so on. Thenagain we have stray references to Mosquito IVs (which should have been