Background

This book tells the story of the Grumman SA-16A Amphibian as used by the Italian Air Force after World War II. It is NOT a study of all users of the type, as the Wayne Mutza book on the Albatross, published by Shiffer in 1996, was. This book gives a very brief account of the service life of the plane, and then shifts to Italian service exclusively. It therefore fills a gap, as Mutza’s book has very little coverage of Italian service.

One feature of the book is that the text is printed side-by-side in Italian and English, but the typeset is different, which I thought made the English text a little harder to read. Another problem is that the translation from Italian to English is a little bit strange grammatically, as words like “aircrafts” appear frequently. But it is understandable, and there is a lot of information in this book that is not available elsewhere.

“It all started with few maps and an innocent German rafting expedition.” (Chapter 4, page 20). The war for the Siachen glacier sounds like something from a historical fiction book. One pundit called it two bald men fighting over a comb, but Operation Meghdoot was a 36-year-long shooting war fought at the highest elevations ever (up to 22,000 feet or ~6700 meters) between two bitter, next-door neighbors with nukes fighting over the largest ice mass on Earth outside of the polar regions. Where the weather killed many times more men than the enemy, and where China was ever a threat to intervene at the top of the world. Warfare rules were rewritten for constant cold weather and elevation, and helicopters were absolutely essential. This “operation” was mostly ignored by the rest of the world, and still has very large geopolitical aftershocks. Meghdoot is Sanskrit for Cloud Messenger, an apt moniker.

Casemate Publishers presents ShipCraft 27, British Sloops and Frigates of WW2 by Les Brown from Seaforth Publishing. This long-awaited book is a ship modeler’s dream come true as a reference work on the large numbers obscure but important Royal Navy antisubmarine warships that helped turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic. This easy-to-digest book details each of the 17 classes of sloops and frigates used by the Royal Navy in WW2. These mostly forgotten, smaller warships focused on convoy escort duties and helped revolutionize antisubmarine warfare tactics. This book lists class history, available model kits, model accessories, many photographs, camouflage examples, line drawings and color plates of finished models – a superb reference for these plentiful ships with many possibilities for modelers.