New Mosquito Book Captures Essence of Elegant Multi-Mission Aircraft

de Havilland Mosquito - an Illustrated History
Crecy Publishing (dist. in USA by MBI, and available on Amazon)
Review by Ned Barnett
Review copy courtesy Crecy and MBI

The new Mosquito book (de Havilland Mosquito - an Illustrated History) by Crecy arrived today, and though I'm on deadline with a client, I just spent two enraptured hours browsing through it - reading some of the chapter introductions and not less than a hundred or so captions. The book is mostly previously unseen photos and remarkably detailed (I mean REMARKABLY detailed) captions. Never seen anything quite like it.

I cannot believe that any modeler wanting to build a Mosquito could do so without this book - it has details beyond galore, markings I'm not used to seeing on RAF aircraft (American-style nicknames, mission-marks, etc.), battle damage, weird offshoot uses ... everything - including a special section on the anti-sub version with a 57mm (aka 6-pounder) cannon.

As for historians, no one can really understand the operation of this magnificent flying machine without wading deep into the operational specifics of individual aircraft, and this book does it in spades. A final "thank you" to the author - those war-time de Havilland ads are eye-poppers - one of them showed the aircraft at an angle that made me immediately realize how much later DH aircraft (the NF Sea Venom is what I'm thinking of) were based on the design work of the Mosquito - but all show a real taste for the wartime nature of Britain, one I found enchanting (as I did all those photos of the UK's own "Rosie the Riveters" building the Mosquitos).

Cap that off with the clear superiority of Crecy book manufacturing standards (remember, I've worked with a half-dozen publishers and had nine of my own books published - and I wish any of my publishers or publisher-clients did half so good a job at producing a fine-quality product), and this is a remarkable, fantastic book.

Bottom line - if you have any interest in the Mosquito - you NEED this book. Distributed by MBI in the States, Crecy in the UK and who knows in Oz and elsewhere - but on Amazon and certainly well worth picking up.

I'll publish a more detailed review later - but this is too good to wait.