The Northrop F-5E found a home with both the USAF and USN as a dissimilar air combat training aircraft, more commonly known as an Aggressor or Top Gun Adversary aircraft. A former brother-in-law of mine was kind enough to invite me to Nellis AFB in the late 1980’s as he was going through his Aggressor pilot training before being posted to Bentwaters, UK. Getting a chance to see a group of “cheap” F-5E’s “shoot down” a flight of F-15’s was quite an impressive achievement, but then that was the purpose of these highly trained adversary pilots, to teach tactics used by Eastern Bloc pilots and their satellite air forces. I previously was a big fan of the uniquely painted aircraft and getting to see them in person and watch them in action just solidified my interest in them. (Yes, I know that the 527th patch is USAFE based, but I didn’t have a 26th AS patch in my collection).

Frederick A. Johnsen has been a fire bomber enthusiast since childhood. He saw his first, a TBM Avenger, in 1961 and was hooked. Mr Johnsen has been an Air Force historian, NASA public affairs officer and is currently the director of the Air Force Flight Test Center Museum at Edwards AFB, California. He has written over 20 aviation books and articles for numerous periodicals.

Fire Bombers In Action is an 8.5 x 11”, 144 page, softbound book containing 120 black and white and 114 color photos. It includes a 60 minute DVD (more on that later.)

Two aircraft are represented on this sheet of decals for the P-38J aircraft for the 9^th Air Force, and as the title sheet suggests, nose art of wicked women. One set for the 402^nd Fighter Squadron, 370^th Fighter Group flown by Lt. Ian B. Mackenzie with D-Day invasion stripes. His nose art is the “Vivacious Virgin II”. The second choice is for the 80^th Fighter Squadron, 8^th Fighter Group flown by Lt. Charles B. Ray sporting “San Antonio Rose” for his nose art.

These are very nice decals produced for the P-38 Lightning. There are two complete sets of decals here including the stenciling. Three sets of national insignia are provided, one being in a faded blue. There is no need to cut around the solid color decals and some of the stenciling, since there isn’t any to be found. The decals are thin and shouldn’t sit in the water too long to soften up.

Back in the late 1980’s, I was stationed at Sembach in Germany. Having left England behind in 1986 due to reassignment, the word on aircraft modeling was mostly about what Revell and Italeri were up to. Everything in the shops was Revell or R/C related, and my only link to what was happening in the rest of the static scale world involved the Squadron shop flyers. A friend from Miami sent me a letter saying “sign up for the “Golden Eagle Society” newsletter… the word here is there are going to be 1/48 PBY’s, F-89’s and F-102’s from a major manufacturer…” I signed up, saw the newsletter, and was thinking to myself, “Yeah, right”. But at the same time I had high hopes; we had, in the space of a few years since 1982, seen the F-106 from Monogram, along with the consummate A-10, A-37, and the A-6 (the latter under the Revell label, but it was a Monogram kit based on the stock number lettering tab on the runners).

Several weeks ago, I attended a change of command ceremony for a unit of the United States Army Special Forces at Ft. Bragg. My mind was still full of memories of Ft. Bragg and the visit to the Airborne & Special Operations Museum when this book became available for review. I jumped at the chance to do the review. Thank you SAM Publications for providing the review sample.