William Wolf (1)

At one point, about five years ago, I did have the opportunity to browse through this volume in a book store, and my snap impression was that it wasn't worth my purchase, but it might be worth getting out of a library. Having finally had the chance to sit down at length with the work, this is less systematic of an exercise than one might want. On one hand, Wolf wanted to offer a tribute to the "Golden Age" of pre-WWII aviation (his father having spent some time basically being a barnstormer). On the other, Wolf is obviously more comfortable writing about the multi-engine bombers that are his bread and butter. These two subjects don't mesh all that well, at least in the way Wolf has structured this work (mostly on a country by country basis). That said, I would have been delighted to have encountered a book like this in my mid-teens, so it's probably a perfectly acceptable book for the general reader.… (meer)

This book's major value is as a catalog, especially for lesser-known weapons, which is why I gave it two and a half stars. There is a price to be paid, however. The writing is poor with bad word choices and much disorganization. This author needed a good, tolerant editor, and Schiffer failed to provide one. This flaw, coupled with my knowledge gained from reading the previous two volumes of this series that this author plagiarized regularly from all he sources he had access to diminishes the quality of this work considerably.

It is evident that the author used his vast collection of official documentation to generate his text--it often reads like a technical manual or report. However (and this is where a good editor would have been helpful) this author slapped the various accounts together literally. So there is a lot of overlap of the different weapons and projects with the same people being mentioned, however with conflicting dates and ranks. There is also repetition of sentences and paragraphs.

All this being said, this volume is an invaluable resource for early U.S. guided missile development. All of the various guidance modes used by U.S. missiles for the next 25 years were invented between 1943 and 1945--infrared, TV, active radar, semi-active radar, and anti-radar. It wasn't until the 1960's that other missile guidance concepts began to appear.… (meer)