49th Fighter Group: Aces of the Pacific

By William Hess

The 49th FG was sent to Australia in early 1942 to help stem the tide of Japanese conquest in Java. Too late to save the island, the group went into action in the defence of Darwin, Australia, where the Forty-Niners’ handful of P-40E Warhawks were thrown into combat alongside survivors from the defeated forces that had fled from the Philippines and Java. This book assesses the outstanding performance of the 49th FG, pitted against superior Japanese forces. By VJ-Day the group had scored 668 aerial victories and won three Distinguished Unit Citations and ten campaign stars for its outstanding efforts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781472802040

Reviews for 49th Fighter Group

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A rather more workmanlike number in this series that leaves me with some questions. The big question being what was the logic in the 9th Fighter Squadron apparently being the first unit in the Southwest Pacific to receive the Lockheed P-38. While happenstance is often about the only explanation one is going to get for the activities of the 5th Air Force it's just something that irritates me as to how the author has no thoughts on the subject. One could imagine that either the 9th was seen as rather more elite than the other two squadrons in the group, so they received the new fighters, or, perhaps, that as men who had completed their tour of duty rotated out fresh pilots trained on the P-38 rotated in with the aircraft they were familiar with.