[Larry Hickey]

Mr Schmitt,

This is NOT designed for digging purposes, although I can't say that others won't use it as a guide for such purposes. In a brief summary, The "Eagles over Europe" is a cooperative project of many of the top researchers on the air war in Europe 1939-1940, working collaboratively to create a definitive history of the air war during that period. This effort is planned to result in a whole series of what will eventually be many dozens of volumes (A-4 sheet size) that cover the airwar on both sides, all carefully woven together. These will be 128-pages books in color with text, photos, maps and artwork that each cover chronologically anywhere from a single to several days of the Polish Campaign, The Phoney War/Sitzkrieg/Drôle de Guerre, The Scandinavian Campaign, The Western Campaign, the Battle of Britain and The Blitz (to the end of 1940). The skeleton for the German side of the story is the approximately 7000-page manuscript created over his lifetime by the late Heinrich Weiss, of Bavaria. The EoE project owns the copyright to this manuscript and has completed a full translation into English of this document from 01.09.39 to 31.12.40. Many researchers, historians, enthusiasts, photo collectors, aviation archaeologists, artists, map makers, etc are collaborating with this effort, which will include a definitive listing, whereever possible illustrated with related photos, of all aircraft losses and damages on all sides during operations during that period--probably at least 8,000 incidents total--a massive amount of data. This information will be keyed to elaborate maps of each covered period. The aircraft loss/damage info is based upon the work previously published and now greatly elaborated upon by Peter Cornwell, assisted by many other researchers. Each day's combat operations, including all a/c losses, are being entered into an elaborate copyrighted map system created for the project, based upon the latest mapping technology.

What you are seeing in TOCH posts such as this is an effort to improve our details on specific known losses during the Phoney War/Sitzkrieg period, and, wherever possible, locate any photos that relate to the incident--crashes, crewmen, captors, mission targets, etc. Much additional photography will be used to illustrate other aspects to the air activity during that period besides a/c crashes.

This project has been advancing for about 10 years and over 100 people in 15 countries have contributed their efforts and expertise to this project. Our photo DB alone now totals over 66,000 digitized images that have been indexed with some 20 different characteristics allowing almost instant retrieval. We have been concentrating on The Polish Campaign at the moment, the first volumes of which will be published next year. Hopefully the first volume (of probably several) on the Phoney War and the first volume on the Scandinavian Campaign will also likely be published. Some volumes will cover only a single day of intense operations, such as the opening days of certain campaigns, others, such as during the Phoney War, may cover a week or more during the depths of the winter of 1939-40. These do not just cover fighter combat during the major campaigns, but the whole array of operations each day, including coastal patrolling and mining operations, near daily bomber operations on both sides and transport operations that support ongoing operations. For example, we have a major project on-going to document as thoroughly as possible the initial operations against Holland on 10 May 1940, that includes the airborne, glider and the airfield attacks using the Ju52 transports. The material and photos that we've collected on just the opening day or two of that effort will likely fill a single or more volumes.

So that in a nutshell, is what this is all about.

Regards,