[FalkeEins]

..my copy has arrived and I've been dipping in and out of it ever since. My comments & concerns earlier on this particular thread aren't really valid at all.. in fact I'd go so far as to ask why the authors would want to use older sources such as Jung, Hennig & Bethke or Rose - as they do on occasion when dealing with JG 300...Bretschneider downed by flak on 24 December 44 ? - thats from Hennig & Bethke I guess..the Kommandeur of the 'newly-formed' IV./JG 300 lost on 17 December..? Maj. Heino Offterdinger survived the war - pictures of his 'Green 45' taken in March 1945 feature in the JG 300 book. Elsewhere the account of Walfeld's II./JG 300 ramming on 11 September is taken from Dahl - unfortunately Wahlfeld (spelling) was a Sturmstaffel pilot and this incident occured in January or March 1944 and was featured on the cover of an edition of the Berlin Illustrierte. Similarly the G-6 photo taken from Jung on P234 is not 'Yellow 2' in the fall of 1944 but 'Red 12' in the summer of 43 at Hangelar..

Enough nit-picking- the JG 300 stuff is only a very small part of the whole. It would be very churlish of me not to say that I'm enjoying this. The book is relatively large format, 320 pages, and the narrative scope is a lot wider than I imagined it might be - there's a lot of reading here and the material is superbly organised with any number of different themes cropping up throughout. Chapters 1 & 2 cover the period 1914-1941, while other chapters deal with the 'Oil campaign', 'The big 'blow' that never fell' and 'The final desperate expedients'. The text is detailed, very readable and well written, with most 'big' dates (7 July 44, 27 Sept, 2 November, 14 January 45, 24 March 45) given reasonable treatment within the space allowed - perhaps the Sturmgruppen really merited a chapter of their own although this would admittedly have made it very difficult to organise the rest of the material ...

Photographic content is OK.. There are of course a number of pictures of JG 26 personalities (perhaps too many portraits, but I guess they were easier to lay out) while I have to say a good number of shots were new to me - the schraege Musik Fw 190 for one.. Otherwise the text has a good number of pilot accounts - although some of these are curtailed no doubt for reasons of space, eg Ernst Schroeder's long account from 17 December 1944, or II./JG 300 Guenter Kuring's description of his ramming of a B-17 on 14 January 45. The maps and diagrams are good as is the lengthy discussion of fighter command and control techniques and organisation, fighter doctrine, morale and motivation (a little familiar that passage) and the summing up. A little irritatingly perhaps the authors use their term 'RLV' throughout - I'm sure this came up in discussion here before, but all things considered is probably a useful shorthand..

conclusion .. within one set of covers this is quite probably the best overview in English on the subject..in fact there's no contest ... (9 out of 10)