Book Review - Pictorial History of the Royal Australian Air Force by George Odgers

 Pictorial History of the Royal Australian Air Force by George Odgers

Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977 (first edition 1965)         ISBN: 0725403942

An interesting little book. George Odgers was a Group Captain in the RAAF and a respected historian of the service, responsible for one of the volumes of the official history of the RAAF in World War 2. This book is a very potted history, beginning at the beginning and taking the reader into the 1970s, when the airforce was still running the Mirage III as our main fighter, the F111 as our strike 'plane, and Neptunes for maritime patrol.

The Army was interested in aviation soon after the advent of the airplane, but it was 1912 before the first flight, with four officers, was formed. Soon after, World War One began. The Australian air effort began in Mesopotamia, where a small contingent of Australians fought the Ottomans alongside Lawrence of Arabia amongst others, and developed supply from the air during the siege of Kut. Soon more were fighting in Europe, with Australian squadrons formed initially within the RFC.

It was not until 1921 that the RAAF was formed, and the first years as an independent service were hard, with a lack of funding affecting every aspect of work. Soon enough war clouds were forming in Europe again, and with the outbreak of World War Two came the most rapid expansion in the history of the Australian Military forces. After World War One, the service was hoping to have 3,300 personnel - during World War Two over 200,000 men and women were enlisted, thousands of aircraft were taken into service, and Australian aircrew flew bombers over Germany, fighters in Italy, as well as the more commonly known theatres of war in the Middle East and the Pacific.

While the Australian effort was a big one for our capacity, it was a small part of a much bigger Allied effort. Soon enough the RAAF were employed in a small way in the Korean War, Malaya, the Indonesian Confrontation, and Vietnam. The crews and 'planes employed punched above their weight, and Odgers describes the individual exploits as well as the tactical and strategic outlook.

Being a pictorial history, the illustrations are as important as the text. The colour plates are magnificent, and the liberal sprinkling of black and white photos are perhaps not what one would expect - many of them I haven't seen in other works, and there are as many pictures of men and women at work as there are of aircraft.

Not a bad little book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Jesus by A.N. Wilson

 Jesus by A.N. Wilson

London: Pimlico, 2003 (first published 1992)              ISBN: 0712606971

I bought this book under the impression that it was a biography of Jesus. In a way it is, but it is also a book about the impossibility of such a biography, about what we can guess about the historical Jesus and how, in A.N. Wilson's view, the Church has created a religious Jesus that the actual Jesus would have abhorred.

Wilson explains firstly how Paul pretty much single-handedly created the Jesus of the Cross- the Son of God that we know and worship now. Then he goes on to explain what the Gospels were, how they weren't written as history but as religious texts to support the development of the early Church. In Mark especially, we see a text written by someone justifying the Church, and positioning it as a friend of Rome and an enemy of the Jews.

However that may be, we can begin to see through the fog of history and glimpse the "real" Jesus through careful textual investigation. How is this done? By various means: in Mark for example, Wilson points out passages where it is clear that the author is relaying a story which he doesn't understand - these parts of the Gospel we can surmise come from an earlier tradition. In a similar vein, we can search through the sayings of Jesus and track potential interpolations: if the Greek of the Gospels doesn't make sense in Aramaic (the language of Jesus), it may be a later interpolation.

We can look to the things we can surmise what Jesus actually said and the things he is reported to have done to try and get a sense of him. Firstly he never claimed to be the Son of God. He seemed, in the sayings that Wilson thinks may be authentic, to be emphasising an individual relationship with God rather than suggesting a creation of an institutional church with rules and laws. The Church we know now is a creation of the people that survived Jesus, not of the man himself.

Wilson also claims that the only way to make sense of Holy Week is to assume that Jesus was somehow connected to Jewish rebellion. We know through other sources that Jews were in constant ruction - prophets and rebels abounded during this time Jesus was active. Wilson points to the facts of Holy Week, where Jesus acquires a donkey colt on which to ride into town (in fulfillment of prophecy), and has a room to meet already organized (Wilson casts doubt on whether there was a Last Supper - John, the only Gospel that can be shown to have eyewitness accounts of what happened, doesn't mention a meal), as showing that the had a network of acquaintances in Jerusalem that went beyond his Disciples, acquaintances who were prepared to work for him.

Whether Jesus was actively engaged in rebellion against Rome, or whether he was caught up in a rebellion that was not his can't be known, but Wilson thinks that Jesus ended his life on the Cross thinking that his mission, his message, and his life had ended in failure.

Jesus is a book of opinions and surmises, but Wilson shows the reader how he makes the surmises and why he has the opinions, all the while explaining his sources (there are good notes and a decent bibliography in the edition I read). The mystery of Jesus' actual life will never be fully deciphered, but in Jesus, Wilson has built a possible life, all the while explaining why we have ended up with the Jesus of the Church that we have now.

Really well written, I can recommend Jesus as a great read.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell