Mitsubishi A5M Claude (Yellow Series)

A great little resource on a generally unknown, but important aircraft. The A5M was the father to the notorious A6M ZERO from Japan. It was the first all metal monoplane carrier borne aircraft. The Imperial Japanese Navy used it well in China during the 1930s and into the opening phases of the Pacific War with the USA. The defenders of Wake Island had to deal with this aircraft. It was replaced as a front line carrier fighter by 1942, but served on as a land based fighter for the rest of the war. Late war saw some "Claudes" serve as Kaamikaze aircraft. None seem to have survived the war. Itwould be unique to see one sitting beside a Boeing P-26 of the 1930s...the design of the Japanese aircraft shaared many general layout details with the Boeing. The volume contains adequate photo coverage and captions to satisfy anyone curious about the A5M and color profiles are nice as well as informative. The shipping and handling from Amazon were Four-0 as they Navy once put it! Worth adding to your collection.

Not enough reference material has ever been written about this landmark Japanese Navy fighter which secured the skies over China prior to the outbreak of the Pacific war in December 1941, which fought the in first few battles of that war up until the middle of 1942, and which ultimately led to the design and building of the ubiquitously famous Mitsubishi A6M Zeke or "Zero". Mr. Januszewski has done a marvelous job of exposing this up-until-now totally underexposed Japanese fighter as the great airplane that it was.This is a book for anyone who is interested in the early Pacific battles of World War II and the obsolescent, yet important, "also-ran" equipment that fought in them.I highly recommend this book as THE primary source of reference for the A5M Claude.

This monograph provides a good summary on the A5M Claude.

Excellent reference with great artwork!

Well pleased

Seems fine. haven't read it in detail, so no further comment.

Fine Book

I bought this book to get a better understanding of the A5M Claude. I have read a few books on the A6M Zero and it had built up my curiosity around Mitsubishi's previous plane, the A5M.The book is great for reference material, lots of diagrams, pictures and operational data. This book is not so much like a novel as a collection of data and operational history about the A5M.I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in early war Japanese aircraft.

When this modest little book came through the post I thought 'mmm, is that it, then?', but when I looked through it I was more than impressed. The Polish authors and publishers have done an excellent job. There are 69 photographs and 23 good line drawings: the latter are accurate though rather faintly drawn. There are no fewer than 47 colour profiles and these are quite simply the best I have seen in any book. The text gives a history and full technical details covering all variations of the A5M series, which was a ground breaking design at the time. In addition there's a very interesting account of the war in China that was on- going between 1937 and 1939. All of these things are somehow presented in an unassuming volume of just 79 pages!The only real compromise concerns the small size of many of the photographs, but in the 1930's the Japanese were not yet the masters of photography they were later to become; as a result the poor quality of many exposures would not allow for satisfactory enlargement anyway. The colour profiles are presented 'sideways', two to a page on a good scale and a number of 'plan' views are included. Just about every livery these aircraft were to be seen in is covered and the pilots who flew the aircraft illustrated are often named. I am not a modeller, but I really appreciated this effort. Good quality glossy paper is used for this book and that serves to enhance the quality of these profiles.As an unexpected 'bonus' I learned a lot about the air war over China- something I knew very little about. My only criticism here is that the authors tend to accept Japanese victory claims as factual whereas in reality they were always notoriously over- optimistic. At one point it is admitted that the Chinese only acknowledged about a third of these and from what we know of the Momonhan Incident and World War Two that is probably about right: If it were otherwise the Chinese would have run out of aeroplanes very rapidly.Unfortunately this little book is now rare and I had difficulty acquiring my copy- but it was well worth waiting for.

overpriced