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Originally Posted by drgondog
Nick - if you will PM your email I will send you examples of Mission Summary reports and individual Mission Board maps.
Regards, Bill
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Cheers Bill, but no need. I've looked at few (single figures!) 8th AF mission reports myself, in the UK National Archives. I entirely get the point you're making. Alfred Price published a very enlightening USAAF diagram of the distribution of escorts many years ago in "Battle Over The Reich" which put a whole different slant on commonplace statements in books like "X hundred bombers took part, escorted by Y hundred fighters."
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I do not know where Mr. Murawski got the information for his books, other then First Hand accounts from Luftwaffe fighter pilots, Second hand accounts, Units diaries and so forth.
Oberst
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That kind of makes my point for me: the more you know about an author's sources the better able you are to judge the points they make. I posted before about perceptions of numerical inferiority which frequently feature in participants' accounts. Those accounts tell you how people
felt, they don't necessarily tell you how things
were. That's why some researchers spend years digging through files.
Mr Murawski is a very prolific author which doesn't suggest that he would be able to spend a vast amount of time researching any given title. Now this may be unfair: he could have an unusually high capacity for such work; he could have a team researching for him; he may have spent many years accumulating research which is only now appearing in his books. Nevertheless, my experience and that of other researchers I know is that original research takes a very long time to do.