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by Tony Holmes.
Softcover (7.25×9.75 inches). 80 pages. 2025.
Subtitle: Phoney War and Battle of France
The Dogfight series strives to match first-person accounts of flying the featured airplane with ribbon diagrams of how the aerial dogfight progressed.
Depicting 3D action is very challenging and the ribbon graphics come the closest to explaining the moves and counter-moves of the pilots.
Design, development, and deployment find the Spitfire over Dunkirk (France) and the UK. Training, tactics, and combat follow. You’ll have a good idea of what it was like to fly a Spitfire in battle by the end of the booklet.
Interesting factoid: A Spitfire took twice the number of hours to build as a ME-109 and 2.5 times the number of hours to build a Hawker Hurricane (p17).
The booklet contains 53 black and white photos, two color illustrations, two color diagrams, one color map, one color one-page action illustration, and three color ribbon combat illustrations.
Plenty of Spitfire books arrived over the years and to a certain extent, I didn’t find too much that was new. Of course, if you’ve never read anything about the Spitfire, this will all be new. I find the ribbon diagrams the best a 2D page can do to depict 3D combat.
Enjoyed it.
— Reviewed by Russ Lockwood
