[Frank Olynyk]

John,
I talked with Chris about your concern with the lack of sources. The initial, basic, problem is that he ran out of time. You may remember at the beginning of the year there were a number of delays in completing the book. Partially due to reorganizing the Grub Street schedule, and partially to the need to locate sources at the PRO to fill in some holes. I believe that when Chris and John Davies were discussing photos and photo captions, Chris suddenly realized that there had been no bibliography prepared. So he hastily prepared what you see in the book, simply based on his own personal library.

With regard to a full bibliography, Chris feels that over the course of the 5-6-7 volumes (the first four volumes will get us to December 1943; how many more for 1944-45? Including a volume on the invasion of Southern France, and the progress of that campaign until it joins the campaign in northern France and western Germany) that we are talking 50-100 pages of references to source material in the NA/PRO, NARA II, BA/MA, and Italian archives. We will at the least try to catalog all of these sources as a file. If there is a final volume similar to that of volume 4 of 2nd TAF, the list would go there. That is probably five years away, and whether Grub Street would be willing to publish such a volume (bibliography, unit lists with commanders and dates and locations, miscellaneous topics) is a question that would have to be decided at that time.

A real question here of course is how many readers of the series will be interested in a 50-100 page bibliography of archival sources? The specialists will welcome it, but how many copies of such a bibliography could be sold? 100 to 200? Maybe/probably. 1000 to 2000? Probably not.

What I suggested to Chris is that I maintain a list of archival sources as we go forward, with the hope of publishing it in a final volume. If that cannot be done, we might try to publish it ourselves (Lulu, for example); hopefully using the same size paper as the series. Or we could find a site on the Internet, TOCH for example, that would be willing to host the file.

Finally, I think it is worth noting who are the members of the MAW "team". Chris Shores has been researching for probably close to 40 years; he is handling the Commonwealth units, and the overall writing and editing. I have been researching well over 30 years, and I handle the American side (along with Chris). Giovanni Massimello has been researching Italian operations for 30 years or more. Russell Guest has been researching on the order of 30 years, and he is handling the intelligence sources. And Winfried Bock is handling the German side (although his first priority of course is the Jagdfliegerverbände series, to which he has now returned); again researching 30 years or more. We will not leave any stone unturned (and if any terns get in the way we will not leave them unstoned).

Enjoy!

Frank.