I may be prejudiced, but this medium-format, very-well illustrated volume is one of the most unusual books I have seen in some time. It is the latest title in Osprey’s “Anatomy of the Ship” series and is worth every penny of its price.

No. 121 in the long-running “Duel” series, this latest title by prolific Osprey author Peter Davies addresses an interesting, seldom-described area in the air war during the Korean War, that of one of the U.S. Navy’s two major jet fighters’ record against the often fearsome barrage of Communist major defenses, that of often intense ground anti-aircraft fire.

Occasionally forgotten in Navy and Marine Corps aviation history, the Douglas F3D Skyknight was a twin-jet carrier-based night fighter with a mixed career that included a brief use in its intended role aboard carriers with the Navy.

Books about the first decade of aircraft development and use by the U.S. military are few and far between, and several have come from the Naval Institute Press, the publication arm of the venerable U.S. Naval Institute, based in Annapolis, Maryland, which the United States Naval Academy also calls home. This latest book on the subject of early military aviation is a lengthy discussion of how the three main American services first discovered aviation then took their time in indoctrinating their first aviation crews and their aircraft into halting use and understanding. It wasn’t easy. Few major technological advances are. It might be said that even today, a century later, we are still learning how to best design and build and finally use the descendants of these flimsy doped canvas-and-wood flying machines. The author has served as an experienced curator of several aviation museums and departments, including the imposing National Museum of the U.S. Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia, certainly not to be missed by tourists of the Washington, D.C., area and especially Marine Corps veterans of any years’ duration. To an extent, his writing emulates that of an academician, typical of a Ph.D.’s (which he is) doctoral thesis, and it starts out with a lengthy heavy-worded introductory first chapter describing how each service began its particular air department.