Luftwaffe and Allied Air Forces Discussion Forum - Jagdfliegerverbände 9/II question.

Gentlemen,

the issue of an English translation of the current Jagdfliegerverbände series has been raised before but so far there are no satisfactory results. I have been approached in the past by three different publishers but so far they have all shied away from the project owing to the sheer magnitude of the matter at hand. At present a very able and talented author / publisher - and a friend of mine - is trying to find a ways to put the whole project in a form that can be realistically tackled by one of the few publishing companies that from its economical standing would be able to handle this series.

As a matter of fact the first problem is the high number of Volumes that this series would comprise in the end if we can continue with it; I don't know myself how many Volumes and subvolumes there will should the series ever be completed, as we can only proceed from one to the next volume, not knowing what mass of data and material and of course photos waits for us around the next corner. Vol. 9 - Operations in the East 1942 - had to be broken up into three subvolumes, 9/II and 9/III both comprising almost 600 pages each. And as of now it looks as though Vol. 10 - Home Defense 1943 - will be of equal proportions.

The next problem is that we cannot promise that we will ever be able to complete the series, since none of our group is doing this as a professional. A lot of things can happen that would lead to other priorities in life and put an end to this whole project. That however is a prospect few publishers are prepared to accept.

In no case money was the reason that the project was no longer contiued with from the publisher's end as far as our royalties / fees were concerned; for those who still think that one could get rich from writing books on German Fighters it may come as sobering news, that in fact the four authors of this series together are enitled to collect EUR 3,75 gross per volume sold and have to cover part of the costs of the maps etc. as well as part of the photo royalties from that amount. And of course the sometimes hilarious costs of photos acquired through ebay. Which leaves almost nothing at the end. This is in no way intended to lament or provoke the pity from our readers as we all know what we do and thoroughly enjoy working on this subject and are more or less happy with the results.

So to sum it up: Right now, there are no immediate plans for an English edition of the JFV series, only some more or less advanced ideas of how to transform the series into something manageable for the English speaking market.

However, I think that anybody who was mainly interested in exploiting the claims and loss lists as well as the other tables doesn't have to be able to speak a great deal of German. Instead, a good dictionary would suffice to translate all the contents of the lists since there are only key words used, no full length or intricate sentences.

And to you, Frank Olynik - no offence intended, but it's a little bit more than just 50 pages or 10% of pure text per volume.

Hope this helps

Jochen Prien