A new book in my library. (2 Viewers)

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Another rather nice arrival....:D
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Agreed, my preorder was over a year old lol. I haven't had much time to dig through yet but looks good
 
I just received this one:

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There are some fascinating photos, particularly showing Commonwealth Bren Gun Carriers and Lanchester armoured cars but some of the captions are WAY off target. I haven't checked every single image but several of the aircraft captions are clearly incorrect. I've cited a few examples below.

For some reason, the author identifies every Brewster Buffalo as belonging to "a RAAF squadron" when at least 3 photos are of aircraft belonging to 243 Sqn RAF. When he does correctly identify the service with a Buffalo pic, he gets the number wrong - 454 Sqn instead of 453 Sqn.

But it gets worse....

A Beaufort is identified as a Blenheim MkIV. He also has a pic of a Blenheim MkI night fighter which he labels as being over Tengah airfield, Singapore, when in reality it's merely a crop of this photo below which was taken over the UK!

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The pics of Japanese Ki-43s all post-date the Malayan Campaign, indeed most are Ki-43-IIs with 3-bladed props when the type used in the Malayan Campaign was the Ki-43-I with the 2-bladed prop.

Most incredibly, calling a Lockheed Hudson a Bristol Bombay. Granted in the latter case, the aircraft is a wreck but one would still expect the "author" to know that the RAF in the Far East didn't even operate Bombays.

Overall, while the book has some fantastic, and previously unpublished, pictures of the campaign, the caption errors and other mistakes are so bad that I question everything in the book. At least one photo of soldiers clearly dates from later in the war, probably Burma circa 1944-45.

Bottom line - if you're interested in the Malayan Campaign, this is probably worth adding to your library. But be warned and take the captions with a HUGE pinch of salt.
 
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I hate those kind of books. Reminds me of "Last Flight of Bomber 31" where such gems as "50mm machine gun shells" are scattered about the crash site.
 

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