AUSTRALIAN PILOTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 719, 24 April 1953, Page 12

AUSTRALIAN PILOTS

ACROSS THE PARALLEL, The Australian 77th Squadron with the United States Air Force in the Korean War, by George Odgers; Heinemann. New Zealand price, 16/9. HIS book adds little to what we know already about. the war in Korea." If Odgers’s aim in writing it was to stir the public of Australia from the apathy with which it regards that campaign, I doubt whether he has succeeded. For a man who was there-he was the squadron’s press relations offi-cer-he has got into his book little of the atmosphere and urgency of the crises of the first year, especially of the last two months of 1950, when ragged Chinese peasants with rifle and bowl of rice pushed back the United Nations army from the Manchurian border and inflicted a humiliating defeat. His writing is undistinguished, at

times naive: service jargon and American slang may give artificial colour to a War correspondent’s despatch, but they are out of place here. No. 77 Squadron was formed in Western Australia in March, 1942, and moved with the war in the Pacific through Darwin, New Guinea, Los Negros and Berneo to the occupation of Japan. First in Mustangs and later in Meteor jets, its most successful role in Korea has been. as a_ground-attack Squadron: attacking enemy communications, strafing and bombing his troops and transport in close-support operations. Its Meteors were found. too slow and clumsy to match the aggressive Russian

M1GS

W.A.

G.