This book gives an appraisal of the Mustang throughout the significant stages of its history and records opinions and recollections of people who built, flew and maintained this remarkable fighter. The text is largely an attempt to convey to the reader the intrinsic qualities the aircraft was deemed to have by those who knew it well. Specifications and tabulated data are not included. With some 45.000 words and 200 photographs - most previously unpublished - and including colour - the author covers the Mustang at war from the first little known single sortie over France in May 1942, through the fighter-reconnais-sance and fighter-bomber employment by British, Canadian and American squadrons, its development as the long-range fighter saviour of the US daylight bombers and subsequent service in many theatres of war-wave-top escorts over the icy North Sea to Norway, rocket busting forays along the Adriatic coast, nine hour missions to Japan across the vast Pacific—to the last large scale operations among the treacherous Korean mountains a decade later. Many of the accounts are firsthand from Americans, British, Canadians, Poles and South Africans who knew the Mustang at war.