Books to stay away from

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Osprey has a couple of books on modeling the P-51. In one of them they show how to superdetail the SCR-274-N radios used in the 1/48 P-51A and A-36 by Accurate Miniatures. This is a commendable idea but is based on pure fantasy. They got it SO wrong and could have only acquired that information by making it up from scratch. I have some of the real, actual radios and know the real details very well. Aside from that, Accurate Miniatures got the radios seriously wrong in the first place. If you get two sets of the parts I know how to fix them.
 
My least favorite book I've read recently is "Saga of Pappy Gunn" by General George C. Kenney. It's not so much inaccurate as it leaves out a lot of pertinent information, I think Gen. Kenney wanted to make his friend appear better than he was.
For instance, when describing Gunn's addition of the 75mm cannon to the B-25, Kenney says that Gunn took the modified plane up the first time, hit a destroyer with three shots and finished it off with a 500lb bomb. It's possible it really happened that way, but by all other accounts, the 75mm was so inaccurate and so slow to reload, it was rare to get off three shots, and hits were few and far between.
The story needed more detail on a lot of non-technical points as well: I didn't buy in to the reasons that Gunn left his wife in the Philippines to be captured by the Japanese while he escaped to Australia. I get it that I have no appreciation for how crazy things were then, but I feel like that was a pivotal moment in the story and deserved a lot more explanation. During the war, he describes Gunn hanging out with Hollywood starlets while his wife nearly starved in a Japanese prison camp. Never a word about how he felt about that. After the war, Gunn went back to the Philippines while his wife settled in Panama City, Florida - which is just about as far away from him as she could get, without leaving planet Earth. I think that says a lot, but Kenney never delves into the reasons they made those choices.
If you want to know more about Pappy Gunn, I think you're better off going to Wikipedia.
 
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Can I put Dive Bomber from Peter Smith forward. It simply wrong in so many places and biased. My personal favourite was comparing the German Light Cruisers to a RN auxiliary AA making excuses for the German vessels poor armour. In a way he was right the German Light cruisers were not well armoured. But the RN vessel he was comparing it to was a converted Banana freighter with obviously no armour, sub division or any other passive defence any warship has
 
"Chariots of the Damned" by McKinney and Ryan. It is an interesting subject, helicopter operations, and not one on which I am oversupplied with information. But it was so poorly written in terms of flow that I finally just put it down for good.

When you do writing yourself you have to be self-critical, constantly assessing the way you wrote something. Unfortunately this inevitably makes you assess everyone else's writing. And in this case it was too much work to read the book.
 
Caidin's writing drives me up the wall. Aside from the factual errors, his style is so purple and full of superlatives that it really clouds the issues. To hear him tell it, every plane he wrote about was the best of the best.

I've owned and read a couple of Osprey books, one on Baar, one about Tiger tanks, both full of inaccuracies.

Ambrose was a pleasant enough writer to read, but I agree with the criticism above of The Wild Blue; it is indeed essentially a bio of a young George Wallace (not that that's a bad thing), but doesn't really touch on the bomber's pluses, minuses, and idiosyncrasies.
 
George McGovern, not Wallace. Ambrose, at least towards the latter part of his career had some pretty well supported allegations about his doing little research and less writing.
 
I will have to search for the book as I haven't seen it since my move, so I can't remember the title, but one of the most memorable things I remember was an outdoor chow line in the rain and two newly arrived B-24 Lieutenants were walking to the front of the line when a voice called out "You two. To the end of the line." It was Gen. Kenny in line with the rest of the troops. I always thought that incident would boost Kenny's opinion in the men.
 
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