The flyers paid a heavy toll for success. He neatly connects the personalities of the pilots with their actions in the air. Davies wraps up the book with accounts of every Crusader victory. Commanders and lieutenant commanders achieved most of the kills. One called it “a macho fighter pilot’s dream.” The most highly experienced Navy and Marine Corps pilots flew it. The intensity of their pilots’ training and tactics set a new standard for air-to-air maneuvers. They also provided flak suppression, interdicted traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and performed weather reconnaissance flights that usually turned into strikes against North Vietnamese coastal targets. Illustrator magic by Gareth Hector, Tim Brown, and Jim Laurier enhance the book’s many photographs.Ĭrusader pilots flew various types of missions, mainly combat air patrols over North Vietnam to protect bomber and reconnaissance aircraft from MiGs. The diagrams of air-to-air Crusader victories make complicated accounts of the combat action fully comprehensible. The book follows Osprey’s Dogfight layout.

Davies maximizes the glory of that accomplishment in F-8 Crusader: Vietnam 1963-73 (Osprey, 80 pp.

1 claim to fame in the Vietnam War was that its pilots scored a six-to-one kill ration against MiG-17s and MiG-21s.

First us navy boat into vietnam war