From the perspective of the United States, the interwar period, the interval between the First and Second World Wars, our story was insular – the hedonism of the 1920s, the Great Depression, and the road to war. From the US perspective, it was a time of peace. Far to the south of us, there was a bloody struggle between Bolivia and Paraguay over a region known as Chaco. In the newest edition of Helion & Company’s ongoing series on warfare in Latin America (number 20 in their series) it tackles the Chaco War. Like many publishing companies, Helion uses a formula of a concise narrative, photographs contemporary to the time period, color profiles of vehicles, planes and ships, and a small selection of uniforms. I believe that there is a separate volume in this same series that covers the air war. The Chaco War was the first aerial war over South America, so it is really not covered in this volume.

The quality of Japanese aircraft came as an unpleasant surprise to the Allies at the outbreak of the Pacific War, and it was personified in one type, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. One of the finest aircraft of all time, the Mitsubishi A6M Reisen (Zero fighter) first flew on 1 April 1939. It soon showed itself to be clearly superior to any fighter the Allies could put into the air in the early stages of the Pacific campaign. Armed with two 20mm cannon and two 7.7mm machine-guns, it was highly maneuverable and structurally very strong, despite being lightweight.

This is a review of the digital version of the Details & Scale’s Jet Fighters of the U. S. Navy and Marine Corps book which has been released concurrently with the hard copy that is reviewed here. The digital version of the Jet Fighters book is available in both Apple’s iBook and Amazon’s Kindle formats. The digital edition has a few more pages and photographs than the hard copy. I have a MacBook Pro computer, so I decided to try the iBook on my computer. Most people use the iBook app on an iPad, but it works just as well on a MacBook laptop. iBooks can be viewed on Apple iPhones also, although the image is much smaller and difficult to view without zooming in on the page.