In The Skies of Forgotten Courage: The RNAS and the RAF in the Adriatic and Albania 1917–1918

It's a very good account of the war in the area. I did find the lack of an index a great hamper in it value for researching information. I also noted a few discrepancies in regards to map and photographs. In a couple of instances where there was a map and photo opposite one another that referred to the same location the photos had either had the negative reversed or it been placed placed upside down in regards to the map. I found this confusing until I figured out the problem.

A book like this comes around only once in a generation. Andrea Casarrubea has taken a virtually-unknown WWI theater of aerial operations and written the definitive history of it. Who knew that the Royal Naval Air Service and later the RAF had conducted operations against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the southern Adriatic and Albania? (Yes, Albania!) Casarrubea explains in his preface that he had started considering such a book 18 years earlier, when he found documents on these British aviation forces in Italian naval archives and then discovered that there was almost nothing published in English on them.This is a meticulously-researched history that draws from British, Italian, Austrian, and other sources. Casarrubea seems to cover every angle of this campaign, from the internal Royal Navy discussions leading up to the deployment of the British Adriatic Force to his detailed descriptions of the individual bomber and fighter missions that took place in the southern Adriatic region. He explains in his preface that the main missions of the aviation units were (a) anti-sub patrols; (b) supporting the Italian Army in Albania; and (c) bombing Austrian naval and air assets in their port at Bocche di Cattaro. The tables and appendices are outstanding and useful for future researchers, including a full page of abbreviations from three languages and a detailed table of the multiple time zones used by the British, Italians, and Austrians, including corrections for “Summer Time”.Aeronaut Books is to be congratulated for the inclusion of footnotes rather than endnotes, hundreds of photos, and the excellent Bob Pearson aircraft profiles in color. The tables and maps are almost always exemplars of clarity. The only disappointments are the lack of an index and that the Albania map doesn’t show what territories the opposing armies controlled. Those quibbles, though, barely detract at all from such an excellent work.Steve SuddabyThe reviewer is a past president of the World War One Historical Association. This review was originally written for the magazine "World War One Illustrated".

Excellent Book Well Illustrated Fills a Gap in My Knowledge of the Period

OK

Very interesting result of complex and lenghty archive research, with many remarcable pictures. Really a unique work that analyses a quite unknown part of WW 1. I suggest the reading for anyone interested in history.Un lavoro di ricerca storica estremamente accurato ed avvincente, con grande numero di fotografie dell'epoca. Getta luce su un fronte della prima guerra mondiale sul quale si é scritto veramento poco fino al momento. Assolutamente consigliabile per gli appassionati di storia.