Air Mag Hors Serie -L'aviation Italienne sur le front de l'Est.

[Ludovico Slongo]

I've found (by chance) copy of this magazine in a newspaper kiosk of my hometown. First time in my life I read something coming from éditions TMA. Well it's in my opinion -by far- the best volume ever and in whichever language on this not well known -altough quite interesting- subject. Around 80 pages packed with interesting photos and nice colour profiles with an authoritative text that describes in chronological order all the actions of Regia Aeronautica in Russia in 1941-42. The author -Dmitriy Karlenko- appears to have used Italian primary sources and tries to reconstruct every single aerial combat being in this way quite useful for those interested in Italian fighter claims, but the most important think is that for the first time -as far as I know- Karlenko attempts to cross check the Italian claims and losses with those of their VVS counterparts studying Russian documents. Huge holes in the Russian Archives don't permit to complete the job, in particular for the all important August-October '41 period but even so the infos that have come to light are of extreme interest. Karlenko even discovered that the Italian pilots Francesco Peroni and Arrigo Zoli -always belived KIA during a dogfight - never met the enemy during their last mission but had in fact force landed short of fuel in Soviet territory being captured. Then they probably died in captivity. Small mistakes like 152° Gruppo that became Stormo (possibly for a misprint) or the insistence in calling Giannicelli Capitano Jannicelli (that led me to suspect that Karlenko found "Giannicelli" in some original documents) don't affect the value of this remarkable work. The price is only 15 € and I can only recomment it to all the people interested in Italian air force or in the air war in the East. Now I'm really eager to see the two volumes by TMA on the Italian "Aviazione Legionaria" in Spain.

Ludovico.