Eagles over Darwin: American Airmen defending Northern Australia in 1942

great historic read with the flavor of you were there. misprint on the the P-40E. its top speed was roughly 365mph, not 334.

This was somewhat less than I was hoping for. The book itself is nice physically, the layout is nice and it seems to be well bound and so on, coming in at just over 100 pages in fairly large type with a lot of photos and a few illustrations. This is like an Osprey book, but a bit less. It gives a well enough written overview of the situation and the 49th Fighter Groups defense of Darwin, and covers every raid. The cover is pretty (though strangely, it shows a different P-40 paint scheme than the nice looking one shown here on Amazon). There isn't too much other artwork. The book does one important thing - it gives us the Japanese losses as well as the Allied claims, and that is something the older Osprey books definitely don't do. However, there really should be an overview of the day by day and / or total claims and losses for both Allies and Japanese, such as you will find in the South Pacific Air War series or Bloody Shambles by Christopher Shores et al.The stats on the main aircraft covered in the book, P-40E, A6M2 and the G4M bomber, are rudimentary and not quite accurate. The technical data are lacking in detail - much more data is available now than one could find 20-30 years ago, more of the readers are up to speed, and the author should have made a better effort to nail this down. Only the last forty pages of the book actually cover the specific combat encounters with the 49th FG. The first 60 pages cover the catastrophic Japanese raid of Feb 19, training, some musing about air combat and so on.I think some time could have been better spent with more precision and detailed data. The author spends five pages at the end of the book thoroughly debunking a few apparently spurious victory claims by one American pilot, which I think could have been better spent on something a bit more pertinent to the ostensible subject of this book. Overclaiming was fairly common in the early days of the Pacific War.Overall, I'm not sad to have bought this book and it will go onto my shelf, but I didn't learn much and was hoping for a bit more. If you want really detailed information about the Pacific Air War there are more authoritative books you can get such as South Pacific Air War series. If you want to know more about the 49th FG the Osprey book on that unit has a lot more detail than this.