Forgive me then if I add a little more context.
Green's WotTR is a magnificent read, a hugely popular and influential book and a great personal achievement. None of that is at issue.
William Green was an outstanding journalist, but his search of what history was to hand simply didn't go either very far or particularly deep. (A year after the publication of WotTR, it took only part of a day with the Focke-Wulf documents in the Imperial War Museum to discover that the Fw 190 F-1 and F-2 were the exact same aircraft sub-types as the Fw 190 A-4/U3 and A-5/U3. That statement is also in the aircraft handbook.)
Green also wasn't very discriminating or critical in his use of sources. Some were clearly poisoned and contained what were almost certainly deliberately manufactured falsehoods, but, since journalists would rather go to prison that reveal their sources, we now don't know where these came from.
The result is WotTR is riddled with errors and a lot of what we grew up with was actually fibs.
Some of those errors were howlers so egregious they should never have been allowed to appear in print even at the time. (If, in the same book, MW50 technology only appeared in service with Bf 109s and Fw 190s in 1944 how could this credibly have been used with Condors in the summer of 1941?) This was not a case of using the best information available because the best information available doesn't contain wild and obvious contradictions. It didn't take a genius to check the Luftwaffe handbooks - there were enough of them in British hands. Green simply didn't use them.
So, it's a complex picture, and these points need to be set alongside the credit and the nostalgia.
I continue to enjoy reading Green's WotTR for his superb writing style, making a pretty technical subject readily accessible and above all immensely interesting to non-technical readers, and because digging out what we can now show to actually be errors is endlessly fascinating of itself. The facility of Green's style is the enduring part of his achievements.
The disappointment at where we are now is that not infrequently use of the best information available simply isn't happening. This is not a blanket criticism: there are honourable and remarkable exceptions. But not infrequently, rather than the bar being raised it remains at the same low height with a bunch of the same old fairy tales being trotted out. Newer and better information, leave alone the best available sometimes doesn't even get a look-in. The right result is we see the bar raised with each new book that appears.
Humility is exactly the right launch point. Undertaking basic research in the obvious sources should not be beneath anybody working in this field.
If a book is to cover the development of a German aircraft design start with the obvious fundamentals. At the very least, check over the aircraft and aeroengine manuals, check through the German monographs on the type - some of the research may be invaluable even if some the text is well off-course, consult carefully the relevant historical studies published in German - some of the more recent ones are first rate and bang on target, dig into at least some of the original documents, reach out more widely, even email me at
INM.at.RLM@gmail.com. If I've done some digging on your subject, you are welcome to share gratis whatever I have. I'm not looking for credit or even acknowledgement. It'll be enough to see the information used fittingly - or superseded by something even fuller and more soundly based.
The aim is better books; not the same old, same old from Green, but works that demonstrate genuine effort to use the best information available.
The explicit messages for writers then are these:
Don't even open WotTR. There are no good excuses for repeating Green's myths of half a century ago. To do so is a declaration of incapacity.
Please raise the game, look a bit further, dig a bit deeper, truly try to use the best information available and move your subject forward a meaningful step.
In sum, please try make your book really count, not just as another notch on the bedhead.