[Nick Beale]

I’m not going to judge a book I haven’t yet read, nor would I blame an author for their publisher’s hype, but I have looked through the source notes in a bookshop on two occasions now. She has used a lot of memoirs and secondary source articles about airmen but also letters and diaries from archives in Germany; SRA Reports (recordings of prisoners’ conversations) and other National Archives material; and at least one (that I noticed) Luftflotte 3 file from the Bundesarchiv. Also cited is at least one item from German Docs in Russia and a great many reels from AFHRA. That looks to me like a respectable effort. What she makes of that material is of course the next question.

P.S. If you’re going to make interviewing veterans your entry criterion then Second World War research is over, or very soon will be. Some of us were born soon enough to do that but it’s nobody’s fault if they weren’t.