Carrier Observer

By Gordon Wallace

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1853103071
• ISBN13: 9781853103070
• Release Date: June 1993
• Publisher: Airlife Publishing Ltd
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A thoughtful memoir of British naval aviation

The dust jacket of 'Carrier Observer' shows a Japanese Zero diving past a Royal Navy Swordfish. That wasn't Gordon Wallace's Swordfish, or he'd never have lived to write this interesting book. Wallace was a reconnaissance observer, not a pilot, who did not participate in important events. Instead, he was with the Eastern Fleet as it dodged destruction from the Kido Butai in 1942; took part in a minor raid in Tunisia that went horribly wrong for the British; and spent a good deal of the war knocking around in hospitals and trying to catch up with his ship. In the Indian Empire, the war did little to disturb the accustomed and easy pace of imperial life. Wallace is a good writer, and 'Carrier Observer' is a good example of how to tell what the war was like for people only rarely close to stirring events. It was dangerous enough for Wallace personally at times, especially in Tunisia when 60 German planes jumped a flight of nine underperforming British ones. After the war, Wallace worked as a design engineer at de Havilland's, and he has many thoughtful comments about the qualities and uses of warplanes in the 1940s environment. These comments are the most valuable part of the work for general history, but the book is equally interesting as personal history.