Aviation history is full of myths and misconceptions, and writers must not shy away from addressing them wherever they are found. 'Revisionism' has become something of a dirty word, but in reality all good history is revisionist in that it doesn't accept the orthodox version of events as a rigid starting-off point. This is no more apparent than in the study of the North American Mustang. Having just completed a long-term project on early Mustangs, the extent to which mythology has overtaken the aircraft's story seems to me astonishing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the aircraft's name. To this day, it has proved impossible to pin down precisely what it was officially named at all points of its career. Even more strangely, the established name of a Mustang variant turns out to have arisen from errors in published sources fully three decades after the type was in service. It's not too odd for myths to spring up in the early years after an aircraft's operational career, with fallible memory and the fog of war creating fact out of supposition, personal agendas and Chinese whispers. It's rather more surprising to come across something people have come to believe as fact long after the event.
展开▼
