The Grumman F4F Wildcat Book Review
By David L. Veres
| Date of Review | December 2023 | Title | The Grumman F4F Wildcat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Author | Richard A Franks | Publisher | Valiant Wings Publishing |
| Published | 2023 | ISBN | 978-1-912932-35-1 |
| Format | 208 pages, softcover | MSRP (BP) | £26.95 |
Review
The perennially popular Grumman Wildcat enjoys full-on “Airframe & Miniature” treatment in the 22nd installment of Valiant Wings’ respected monographs range.
Billed as “A Complete Guide To Grumman’s First ‘Cat’”, The Grumman F4F Wildcat also includes General Motors (GM) FM-1 and FM-2 variants.
Author-editor Richard A. Franks competently and thoroughly charts the total tale from prewar Wildcat development and deployment through GM derivatives on light (CVL) and escort (CVE) carriers through 1945.
Those GM Wildcats, by the way, perfectly supported larger, faster, and more modern F6F Hellcats and F4U Corsairs operating from frontline USN and Commonwealth fleet carriers.
Text traverses all known variants, design evolution, camouflage & markings, scale models, kit builds, and version-specific minutiae – even funky postwar crop dusters.
As with all “Airframe & Miniature” releases, expect a heaping helping of eye-candy. Hundreds of illustrations – period photos, color artwork, scale drawings, archival images, close-up details, stencils placement, and more – buttress the book.
AMS sufferers will, in short, love it.
But Wildcat’s “full operational use”, Franks understandably cautions, remains “well outside the scope of this title”. And for that, readers must comb through dozens of choices in a robust references appendix.
Three more hefty appendices and tipped-in 1:48-scale drawings conclude contents.
Quibbles?
French G-36s sported blue leading-edge rudders and elevators, as depicted in Richard Caruana’s art – not “red”, as claimed in text. And that’s Atlantis models – not “Atlantic”.
Some official camouflage nomenclature also appears anachronistic. And “the higher price” of new kits like Arma’s Wildcats might easily result from, for instance, low consumer demand – an unfortunate artifact of scale plastic modeling’s overall market decline.
None of these nitpicks detracts from Valiant Wings’ superb study. If your library sports just one volume on the legendary Wildcat, make it this one.
Robustly recommended!
With thanks to Valiant Wings Publishing for the review copy.