Throughout the 1950s, the distinctive wail of the North American F-86 Sabre was as familiar a sound in the skies of the free world as the crackle of the Rolls-Royce Merlin had been a decade earlier.
Most of all, the Sabre is remembered for its air superiority role in the Korean War, when, high over the Yalu River, it tangled with Russia's MiG-15 in the world's first jet-versus-jet combats close to the speed of sound. It was in the cut-and-thrust of high-speed air battle over Korea that the Sabre captured the imagination of the western world, but its contribution to halting the march of communism did not end there.
It was the F-86 that gave the fighter pilots of the principal NATO air forces their first taste of high-speed jet flight, and enabled NATO's air power to hold the line in Western Europe at a critical and dangerous phase of the cold war. Across the world, from England to Japan, the Sabre closed the fighter gap that had been widening steadily with the emergence of new generations of Soviet jet fighters.
Yet there was nothing mystical about the Sabre. In many respects it was a rudimentary, no-frills design, leaning heavily on wartime German high-speed flight research. It was all the more remarkable, then, that the end product was a fighter that was a true pilot's aeroplane, a joy to fly as well as an efficient war machine.
In this book, Robert Jackson charts the operational career of the F-86, from its inception through the embattled skies of Korea to its role as NATO's guardian and after, when it became the fighter workhorse of many Third World nations.