Flying boats in the Med

Flying Boats My Father's War In The Mediterranean, by Alex Frame (Victoria University Press $40). Reviewed by Roy Burke.

This is a respectful pilgrimage by a son tracing nine months of his father's war in the Mediterranean. The year was 1941 and Flight Lieutenant Alec Frame was captain of a Sunderland flying boat.

The author's primary travel guide is his father's meticulously kept and preserved flying log. He builds on its information with wide reading and interviews with several of his father's surviving friends.

The result is an intriguing new view of the Mediterranean theatre, including the Greek debacle and the agony of Crete. Frame takes in Malta and the Middle East and the whole thing attempts to tie together with a Sunderland.

Frame quite neatly makes understandable (and likely) sense of this complex part of the war why did the Allies attempt to rescue Greece when it could only be an impossible disaster? What was the American influence?

Famous names pass through the pages, some of them passengers in Sunderland T9046.

Alec Frame survived the war and later flew flying boats in Sydney, Tahiti and French Polynesia.

The author is a barrister and has been a professor of law at Waikato University. He has written several historical works and a notable biography of Sir John Salmond. The late Janet Frame was his cousin.

Roy Burke is a Hamilton freelance journalist.

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