By God, You Are Going to See Airplanes
“Blue Goose” Command Aircraft of the USN, USMC, and USCG 1911 to 1961
http://dnasab.net/x.php by William A. Riley and Thomas E. Doll, Ginter Books, $35.95
http://justmusing.net/admin.php
Steve Ginter’s Naval Fighters series is well known to aviation fans. Discounting his parallel Air Force series, there are 100 volumes in the set to date. “Blue Goose” is the 100th. Devotees of the series are likely to be thrown off by this new edition, for unlike any of its forebears, this does not focus on a single type or model of aircraft. The subject is the nebulous “command” aircraft. The authors never define the term and therefore the structure is just as nebulous. Judging by the content, a command aircraft is anything any commander ever flew. This includes down to the squadron level. But even that definition does not coincide with the text, photos, and drawings provided. The contents are literally all over the aviation map of the U.S. sea services.
If the book is purchased based solely on the cover, the buyer may be disappointed. For while the cover screams “Blue Goose” Command Aircraft and features a very nice colorful painting of SU-2 BuNo 9095 (which in ALL details looks amazingly like the photo of O3U-3 BuNo 9300 on the bottom of page 26 including the Wasp engine’s exhaust, but not that of the Hornet that powered the SU-2) only 12 pages of the more than 125 in the book cover the era of the true blue geese.
At the heart of this publication is a narrative about aircraft colorings and markings interspersed with concise battle narratives. In this regard it serves neither topic well. There is a very nice little section on the “Halsey-Doolittle” Raid. (This never existed. In all contemporary documents—including Navy—it is the Tokyo Raid, Raid Against Japan, or the Doolittle Raid. Look it up. Revisionists changed the name to give the Navy not only a presence, but also predominance.) What does this have to do with Blue Goose or command aircraft or even naval aircraft markings? There are also action reports from Midway, Guadalcanal, and Operation Torch. Again, what is the relevance to the book? Then there is a two-page advertisement for digital aviation art. Apparently the artist provided his work gratis in exchange for the ad. This doesn’t belong in a book, at least not presented as part of the text flow. But this is not surprising in a Ginter book.
Books consist of two things: content and design. In this one the content consists of both text and graphics in the form of photographs and computer art. The text has already been addressed. The photographs and their reproduction, on the other hand, are—again typical of a Ginter publication—very good. I have worked with a number of these images and am impressed by the quality with which they have been reproduced. The artwork gives a reasonable impression of how many of these aircraft, only seen today in black-and-white photographs, may have looked in color.
The other component, design, relates directly to how the content is conveyed to the reader. This design leaves no doubt that the book’s message is to be gotten through the photographs. Ginter uses every bit of real estate to put something in ink. The problem is that no, the world—and books—are not flat. Every piece of information is not as valuable as every other piece of information. That is why traditional books have title pages, copyright pages, introductions, and prefaces separated from the main body of the text. And it is especially evident in relative photo sizes; some are played big, some small. The text in Ginter’s books is laid out in stream-of-consciousness fashion. Author bios seamlessly segue into copyright data, which seamlessly turns into acknowledgments, introduction, and finally text. In this, Number One Hundred is no different from the 99 that came before.
What this allows, however, is every other bit of real estate to be used for images and this it does as intended. Traditional photo books guide and direct the reader by playing large off small, details versus general. There is none of that here. Ginter knows you want to see airplanes and by God you are going to see airplanes. You want to see the detail, you will see the detail.
My two cents: this is a worthwhile purchase IF you take a quick look at the content and know what it is really about and you want to see a lot of decent, and in a number of instances very good, photographs of airplanes. You will be disappointed in the text, except for that which actually discusses the blue geese.
If you think a disgruntled purchaser wrote this, you are wrong. The publisher provided this book gratis for me to review. This is my unvarnished take.
“Blue Goose” is available from Specialty Press at 1-800-895-4585 or www.specialtypress.com.
Reviewed June 2015
