Book Review: Springboard to Tokyo by Canfield Cook
Squadron Leader Robert “Lucky” Terrell has at last gotten his small group of RAF Stratohawk fighter-bombers to China. There’s a small problem–the Japanese launched a major offensive while our heroes were enroute, and the airfields they were planning to use have been overrun. Only one badly damaged base is in Chinese hands. Bob must use all his tactical expertise to coordinate with the badly outgunned Chinese troops to push the Japanese back enough for the reinforcements to arrive.
This is the fifth in the Lucky Terrell Flying Story series, about a Texan pilot who joins up with the Royal Air Force prior to America entering World War Two. While our hero may be flying for the British, it’s pretty obvious that this book was written for American boys. Various machines are compared to American models, and most of the squadron he’s leading are also U.S. volunteers. (His navigator is Scots, and there’s mention of Canadians.) The story is heavily fictionalized–there were no such things as Stratohawks in WWII, and the military situation in China bears little resemblance to what was actually going on in 1943.
That said, the writing is competent, and the wartime prejudice against the Japanese is kept to a minimum (mostly focusing on the barbaric practices of the Japanese military, which were sadly not fictional.) Characterization is stock, but this allows the Chinese freedom fighters to come off well. Our heroes have success after success, though they do lose one of their planes and have its crew captured to rack up the suspense a notch. Boys ten and up should be able to read this easily, with the usual caveats about reminding them of wartime attitudes.
From references I was able to find, the last two books of the series go into techno-thriller territory by having jet aircraft figure far more heavily into the end of the war than actually happened.
This is an enjoyable enough book, and worth a read if you can find it. Definitely snap up the set of eight if you can find it intact.
