Crowood Seafire

[Test Graham]

This book has left such a bad impression I thought it worth warning people about it.

There are some good photos but the printing quality is grey on grey. The organisation of the book is poor, with (for example) a photo of an S6B being followed by one of an S5 and then by a Seafang cutaway. That the S6B photo is distorted doesn't help, not does the repetition of the caption for the Type 224 later in the book. The section on the BPF comes after the development of the Griffon Seafires, and includes two photos of post-war Seafires. Plus an excessive number of Firefly photos, I thought....and if the (fair) point about the ruggedness of Grumman designs was required to be made, a Hellcat might have been a more appropriate choice than an Avenger.

I don't think (unlike the writer) that the majority of Flycatcher photos are of the floatplane, so his view of one on wheels is not that special. The Sea Hurricanes were not probably 800 Sq on Indomitable but 885 on Victorious. CAM aircraft aside, Sea Hurricanes were not used to protect convoys supplying Britain.

I did wonder if this was a case where an informed author played no part in the captioning of the photos (as apparently does happen, strange as it may seem). So I started on the text.

The Spitfire Mk.VIII was not delayed by the retractable tailwheel, but by structural redesign, leading edge fuel tanks and shorter ailerons.

The Mk.XIII was not made in two batches, one based on the Mk.V and the other the Mk.VIII. It had a structural re-design of the fuselage with a modified Mk.V wing. Some of the tails were from Mk V production and some from Mk.VIII.

The Mk.XVIII did not have a reshaped wing or a bigger rudder, nor was it tested with an arrester hook. This sectionis so bizarre that he must have had something else altogether in mind.

The Mk.20 - the reason it looks like earlier aircraft is because the example shown has a Mk.XIV fuselage, though he might have noticed the redesigned wingtip which is visible.

The author has no idea what is meant by the general adoption of the Spiteful tail, as the captions refer to it on photographs of aircraft that lack it, and notes the earlier variant where the photo does show the Spiteful tail.

The Spitfire development was a direct influence on the parallel Seafire, so these errors are relevant and you can perhaps understand why I am reluctant to proceed to the text that actually deals with the Seafire.

Avoid this book. Clearly Kev Darling was not the best person to write on the subject, and the publisher lacks any form of quality check.

[Dave Fleming]

Sounds like one NOT to pick up in the remaindered shops (My usual source for Crowood books!!)

Edited May 1, 2008 by Dave Fleming

[XV107]

Unfortunately, there seems to be a bit of a trend for irritating inaccuracies in the Kev Darling books. His tome on the Bucc was reviewed in the RAF Historical Society Journal by Graham Pitchfork (who is, I think it fair to say, something of an expert on that mighty aircraft) and he gave a brief highlight of the four sides of A4 worth of errors he'd spotted - all of which were avoidable with some simple cross checking.

I have the Seafire book and agree with Graham - yes, the Seafire was derived from the Spitfire, but I'm sure that a much more creative and interesting means of tracing this could've been adopted than simply giving us a potted history of Spitfire development in Chapter 2. A couple of stray photos of Barracudas pop up with captions that have little if any relevance to Seafires, making them them more appropriate to a book on the FAA in WW2. The number of Firefly photos is silly, and as well as using a Hellcat as representative of Grumman aircraft, I've not yet spotted a photo of a Corsair in there - if you're doing a comparison of FAA fighters in the war, you'd think that one of those might be more appropriate than another Firefly, or the second photo of the Barracuda, or...

The best caption mistake comes on p.144, when the book is dealing with the Korean War (in a rather perfunctory manner, I'm afraid) when a caption relating to the Supermarine Type 224 appears under a photo of a Firefly Mk IV/V. The exact same photo appears a few pages previously, which makes me wonder what on earth was meant to go in the book on p.144 - surely not a photo of the Type 224 in a chapter on post-1945 ops?? There are other silly errors that really should've been spotted during the proofing process.

The captioning of photos by persons other than the author does indeed occur - it's happened to me on a couple of occasions - you open your free copy (only one these days from some publishers), find a photo you don't remember seeing when captioning the others, and read the caption.... which is complete drivel. My favourite was when a side-view of a Wellington was slipped into a book at the last moment. Readers now think that I believe that the Wellington XVI had a displacement of 70,000 tonnes and used a Leelight [sic]... A colleague opened a copy of his own book to find a photo of the landings at San Carlos, with a caption dutifully informing the reader that we sent Three Commando Brigades and Five Infantry Brigades to the Falklands in 1982 - no wonder the Argentines lost!

Edited May 2, 2008 by XV107

[tonyot]

I`ve had the same trouble in some of my magazine articles where photos are cropped so that you can no longer see the thing that the caption refers to, or photos are put in out of sequence so that the captions no longer make sense whilst proof readers or editors have just cropped the text to shreds so that it no longer resembles what you originally wrote..yet there are spelling mistakes everywhere that were not there before...the murky world of publishing is a weird place but the author gets all the sh*t from readers for any mistakes!

Tony O