Reviewed by Tony Pratley.
According to my well-thumbed copy of ‘Popular History for Dummies’, there are a few basic rules to follow. A potential blockbuster must be long enough for the summer holiday and short enough for the beach. Five hundred divided by 50 is a publisher’s basic rule of thumb. Five hundred pages divided into 50 easily digestible chapters. Unremitting action and a host of compelling characters, good but better bad, is also to be encouraged. As for prose style, a breathless simplicity is best with an occasional authorial nod and a wink. The reader ought to be left in no doubt about the happy ending.
Rowland White’s new book ticks all these boxes and more. The one disappointment for this reader comes with the title, the lack of pages dedicated to the de Havilland Mosquito. Designed by a maverick working only in wood. Sponsored by an Air Marshall black balled by the King. Rejected by a press baron way out of his depth. The genesis of the Mosquito is a marvellous tale but not one told here.
Instead, Mr White is more interested in SOE operations in Scandinavia. It is not a complete survey, more of a hop skip and a jump. Mr White lands on those episodes likely to be familiar to his baby boomer target audience, episodes made famous by Hollywood when it was still making war films in the 1960s and 1970s. And what of the Mosquito? Why is it given the title role? Mr White uses it as a recurring motif to tie his individual stories together and as a device it works very well. Every thirty or forty pages over one will zoom to destroy another prison, Gestapo HQ, or factory vital to the Nazi war effort.
So far so good, an old-fashioned thriller, but is it state of the art history? What of Mr White’s sources? An impressive bibliography does go that extra mile by offering primary as well as secondary sources. Mr White has clearly done his homework. Unfortunately for any fact-checker or reader simply wishing to dig a little deeper into a particularly interesting episode there are no footnotes. More troubling is Mr White’s admission in his author’s note of using verifiable dialogue out of context and out of place, to ‘add richness’ (p. x) he explains. Local colour is one thing but ‘spicing up’ is not yet taught in the history schools.
But this is no time to carp about a bona fide popular history success. Hats off to Mr White for successfully elbowing his way onto the Sunday Times best-seller list. In troubled times we need more people to read history and the best place to start is on the nursery slopes. An exciting adventure story then, but not one for the dedicated aviation enthusiast. Ideal for the beach.
Mosquito: The RAF’s Legendary Wooden Wonder and Its Most Extraordinary Mission, by Rowland White (London: Penguin, 2024; 536pp.; £10.99).
Tony Pratley was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Kent in 2018 for ‘The Supermarine Spitfire: Palimpsest, Performance, and Myth’.
Image Credit: ROYAL AIR FORCE: FIGHTER COMMAND, TACTICAL AIR FORCE, 1943. ©IWM (HU 81331), Licence: IWM Non-Commercial Licence.