Lavochkin Fighters of the Second World War

In spite of endeavoring on an honest attemt to write a study on the relatively unknown to the English-speaking public Russian fighters, the author lacks the basic rule: if you want to write about anything Russian or Soviet, you have to speak Russian. If you do not - you confine yourself to the few works already published in the West and miss the huge amount of excellent historical studies published in the last decades in Russia. The book as it is written would have been a very good one in 1990, but it is not to the standard of modern aviation history.On the plus side there is a decent technical description, some good photos and color profiles, on the minus side is the history part, which is sketchy at best, the combat history (that is way too bad, indeed) and, surprisingly, even the modellers side, since once again the author just checked a couple of reference model shops and therefore missed the excellent resin 1/48 kits of the la-9/11 family that were never sold at Hannants.For some misterious reasons the author uses Russian words like zavod, which has an excellent English equivalent “plant”, of calls a regiment a “polk”, which hardly adds to the comfort of an English-speaking reader, and uses abbreviations like Z.21, which would rather suggest a German destroyer and which was never ever used in any Russian document or literature to refer to an aviation plant.Nevertheless, it is a reasonably good book for those unfamiliar with the subject and is relatively unbiased. I would highly commend the author for being very friendly towards the Russian aircraft industry and appreciating the tremendous efforts and sacrifices of the Russian people during the war. However, I would still prefer the good old Red Star series books and even the Osprey series.

This volume strikes a nice balance of data, history, and illustrations. The bibliography shows a fair number of foreign language sources and the author provides online resources as well.As mentioned in another review, there is an interview with a pilot. And there is a brief description of the post WWII Lavochkin developments and the OKB itself. As with his other two works,there is a chapter describing the availability of Lavochkin models in different scales with their various attributes and faults.The color plates and photographs are excellent, the combat and technical coverage is fairly comprehensive for the size of the book. (6"x 9" and 240 pages.)The overall breadth and quality of the coverage makes for an excellent single volume book on the LaGG3 through the post war LA-11.Highly recommended.