[Larry deZeng]

Not strange at all, Peter D. E. And my comment had nothing to do directly with Ed's issue. My criticism has to do with what I see as a very wide and deep chasm with the numerous plastic modelers and zoom-zoom lovers on one side (your constituency) and the very much fewer of us who are interested in the actual history of the Luftwaffe on the other side. In other words, the many against the few. Since the war ended 66 years ago, the zoom-zooms have been done to death to the fifth exponential power and very little research done on the other 95% of the Luftwaffe, e.g., operations, strategy, organization, the Flakwaffe, the Luftnachrichtentruppe, the Bodenorganisation, etc., etc. Why? Primarily because only about 3% of the 50,000 hardcore Luftwaffe enthusiasts in the world can read elementary German. So they reply on shop-worn English language material or pick Werknummern and Kennzeichen out of documents. Nothing new is created. Nothing new is learned. So we have two Luftwaffe web sites: yours and this one. With yours focused on the 5%, it is my hope that someday this one will focus on the 95%. But that ain't a gonna happen. Meanwhile, there is no place for the researcher/historian to go, except perhaps to Axis History Forum where there is a small Luftwaffe sub-forum. The community has already lost dozens and dozens or motivated, knowledgeable researchers that we used to see here in years gone by because they tired of the same fare and lack of interest and knowledge in anything else: Werknummern, markings, fighters and who-shot-down-who. How do I know this? Because I know a lot of them and they told me so. It's really too bad.

L.