An enjoyable reading experience learning more about the support services formed to assist the war effort. The first part was engaging and I appreciated learning about the people involved. The second half was like reading a history textbook and my interest waned, even though I like learning about the dry history details, but it could have been presented with details about people interspersed throughout to help make it more interesting.

This book was not quite what I was expecting, but I did end up liking it and finding it interesting. I particularly liked the section where the author went through the notable women fliers for the ATA. I think that could be expanded into a book of its on, similar to The Women with Silver Wings. I found the writing to be very direct and it read a bit like a textbook or an informational pamphlet, but the topic was enough to pull me in.

I've always been interested in all flight in both World Wars. The ATA is especially interesting because women were involved in a big way. I have a small collection of war aircraft models and I enjoyed matching what I have to the list of aircraft given towards the end of the book.
This is almost a book of two halves. The first part is about the people who wanted to fly and did fly and how the ATA was created. It gave information on, mostly the women, what they did beforehand and what happened to them when they joined this marvelous section of the war. The newspaper cuttings that were included a long the way were very informative.
The second part was mostly facts and figures and lists. I found this part quite heavy going and my concentration lapsed a bit here.
There was a nice summing up at the end and you can tell the author loved writing the book. Some pictures included at the end didn't work out too well in the kindle version. The captions for the pictures didn't match up and I wasn't sure what I was looking at.
All in all a very good, easy read and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in the ATA without having to trawl through huge, dry tomes, for the personal side of this part of history.

Thank you to Pen & Sword Publishing and NetGalley for an early copy of this book.

I have recently become a WWII history scholar. After reading my first historical fiction novel last spring I have been hooked on reading and learning all I can about WWII. I have devoured both fiction and non-fiction books on the subject so when I saw this one available for review I jumped at it. There is so much more to learn about this war than what we were taught from our text books in school. I have been especially interested in all the varying roles women played in the war. The Air Transport Auxiliary or ATA as it was known is one of many subjects I had never heard of.
It was fascinating reading about the heroic women who flew countless missions during the war ferrying planes back and forth, some for repairs or to be exchanged. And some of the women lost their lives in this service as well as some of the men, regardless of it being a non-combat position. Enemy fire, mechanical failure, bad weather conditions all made for threatening situations for these brave men and women.
This is a wonderful book that goes into great detail outlining the history of the ATA for us. It is filled with facts about the pilots and their backgrounds along with facts about the planes that were flown and the missions carried out. It tells of the different ferry pools that were situated around the country that helped ATA cover the whole country while cutting down on time taken to deliver aircraft.
I also liked reading the newspaper articles that were included in the book. These gave an interesting insight into how the events of the war were portrayed by the press at that time.
I would recommend this book to those who appreciate facts without a whole lot of fluff. To me this book is written in such a manner as to list the bare facts of the ATA and their purpose during WWII with out any colorful descriptive fluff or stories.
I give it a 4 out of 5 because although I learned a tremendous amount of facts about the ATA at times the reading was very dry, causing my interest to veer away from the topic at hand. Other than that a good knowledgeable fact-filled book. Thank you to the publishers at Pen & Sword Publishing and NetGalley for the advanced reader copy of the E-book in exchange for my honest review.
#NetGalley
#AirTransportAuxiliaryatWar
#StephenWynn