Admiral VAT Smith – Graeme Lunn

It’s been a while. Sorry.

Regular readers will know of my penchant for the wartime Fleet Air Arm, and my motivation to spread the word about what is always quite a suprisingly extensive bibliography of memoirs and biographies. I am also particularly keen to see more stories of the very few Australian wartime ‘flying sailors’ in print. The most recent one was the Fred Sherborne ‘limited’ bio, An Accidental Hero, which focussed on his evasion in the south of France and had very little to say about his adventurous naval career up until then (or after).

Now, however, leading Australian aviation history publisher, Avonmore Books (distributed by Casemate/Pen & Sword in the Northern Hemisphere), has released Admiral VAT Smith, the biography of the father of Australia’s Fleet Air Arm and a book a long time coming in part due to the subject’s reluctance to talk about himself in interviews.

If the dustcover artwork of this hardback doesn’t sell you (Avonmore also offers a voucher to buy a discounted print of the cover image), perhaps this will. Avonmore’s two recent Australian Fleet Air Arm titles, Flying Stations II (currently on sale!) and The Skyhawk Years are books of astounding quality. VAT surpasses them; it is glorious. The typical Avonmore use of colour within (and world-class Juanita Franzi-Aero profiles!) makes it stand head and shoulders above any other FAA bio. Fair enough, it’s the latest effort, but it will be hard to come close (even for Seaforth or the Naval Institute Press!).

Unsuprisingly, the author follows VAT’s life through his early years and into the Royal Australian Navy, his eventual pre-war qualification as an observer, serving on HMS Ark Royal until the carrier was lost, attacking Scharnhorst (per the cover), catapulting in Fulmars, catapulting from HMAS Canberra in the Pacific (VAT was on board during the Battle of Savo Island), terms as Air Staff Officer Afloat (back with the Royal Navy) and Ashore (back in Australia tending to the British Pacific Fleet), carrier life in Korea, command at sea and ashore, and the highest of upper echelons. It’s a story that encounters some of the greats of the Fleet Air Arm – ‘they have their exits and their entrances’; VAT ‘in his time plays many parts’.

Photo reproduction is superb with some lovely half-page plates dedicated to images whose quality deserves such treatment. Several maps are also presented; they, and the layout, are very clearly the expert work of Di Bricknell. A Tasmanian graphic designer, Di’s work needs to be seen by a much wider audience. Her signature is evident throughout Avonmore’s titles and her map work has graced the pages of aircrew authors such as Kristen Alexander, Graeme Gibson and Ian Campbell, to name a few.

Avonmore has the book listed at a price cheaper than hardbacks imported into Australia; produced at a far higher level of quality, everything about this book makes it the aircrew biography of the year. I’m calling it already.

Available in the Southern Hemisphere.

And, in the Northern Hemisphere.

ISBN 978-0-64570-0-480.