Market research - 'Most Wanted' Luftwaffe books

[Steve Coates]

Personally, I'd like to see more books on type development, particularly the 'cinderella' companies like Klemm.

[Adriano Baumgartner]

A lot of recent "War Diaries" or biographies of former LW airmen have been published in Germany - in German (ex-KG 100, ex StG 77 airmen, etc.)
Maybe some good translations to English would expand this kind of literature around the Globe.

I do agree that it would be nice to have further UNIT STORIES like that already and acclaimed published of StG 2 and KG 100 (ROBA), JG 53 (PRIEN), JG 52 (BARBAS), JG 300 (JY LORANT), JG 2 (MONBEEK).

KG 30, KG 40, KG 55, StG 77, JG 1 and other units for instance.

Am aware that a KG 6 and KG 66 History will see "light" in a near futur and we are awaiting for that.

A.

[MW Giles]

You need to look a little bit harder, Martin...

John

I have nearly all your books; Zerstorer is one of my favourites that I re-read from time to time.

If only you could do something like that for the whole war I would be a very happy man.

Martin

[John Vasco]

Originally Posted by MW Giles

You need to look a little bit harder, Martin...

John

I have nearly all your books; Zerstorer is one of my favourites that I re-read from time to time.

If only you could do something like that for the whole war I would be a very happy man.

Martin

Already been done for the day fighters. Both are now out-of-print.


The original publisher sold the rights on to another publisher, who is not interested in a reprint. So now they are up on a certain site for funny money...

[Alfred.MONZAT]

Originally Posted by John Vasco

The original publisher sold the rights on to another publisher, who is not interested in a reprint.

I wish they would do a reprint like they did with the Nachtjagd.

[John Vasco]

Originally Posted by Alfred.MONZAT

I wish they would do a reprint like they did with the Nachtjagd.

That was discussed at the same meeting I mentioned in my previous post, Alfred. They weren't interested. Also, as I said above, printing methods had moved on drastically, so the plates that were passed to them were quite useless.
But since those two volumes came out many years ago, I have acquired more information and photographs. They have the rights to THOSE two volumes...

[richdlc]

hijacking my own thread here, but a detailed history in English of the Flugzeugwerke Eger would be interesting. Done a lot of reading about it, but only in Czech so far

[Nick Beale]

Having made isolated ventures into book-writing, some comments on the suggestions so far:

Ed: A book of unpublished photos. That's why I collect Luftwaffe im Focus.

Me too, but Lw. in Focus also does a brilliant job of explaining just what we're looking at and that's important to me as well (e.g. the Ta 152 article in issue No. 29). Realistically, the stock of unpublished photos must be decreasing, mustn't it? In that context, I think there's still scope for better interpretation (and computer-assisted enhancement) of the ones we already know. So, I'd favour really thorough captions wherever possible.

Steve: Unit histories, as detailed as possible, especially for units for which there is no unit history.

Again I agree but sources are the problem, especially now that veterans are no longer here to be interviewed and for me the human aspect is very important. Some units' asignments prove quite repetitive so you do need to find unusual incidents to break the routime.

Martin: My only bugbear - histories that take 450 pages to get to the end of 1942 and then 20 pages to complete the path to 1945.

That sounds like why I got into research in the first place! Pierre Clostermann's The Big Show planted the idea that there were months of very active fighting that no one seemed to write about beyond "and then the fuel ran out and Germany surrendered". I'm actually more interested in how the Germans lost than in the "years of triumph" angle.

Martin: covering Lw units - how they were formed, where they were based, what types they operated and when, a brief potted history of the unit and then what units it morphed into when its role changed or it disbanded.

Into the labyrinth! Working out how to present this in a way that anyone without the brain of a particle physicist can understand is a bit of a problem as everything seems to have been in flux all the time. Animated graphics maybe?

Final point: how willing are people to buy a book that tells a new and interesting story for which few, if any, photos exist?

[alessandro bray]

Hallo,
Personally i'd like to see unit histories on Schlachtgeschwader units with good test coverage for the 43-45 timeframe. Maybe the availability of russian archives can give a better pictures of their real impact in term of effective tactical support, tank disable etc....
Alessandro

[Schlageter]

Originally Posted by alessandro bray

Hallo,
Personally i'd like to see unit histories on Schlachtgeschwader units with good test coverage for the 43-45 timeframe. Maybe the availability of russian archives can give a better pictures of their real impact in term of effective tactical support, tank disable etc....
Alessandro

Amen! Larry deZeng's compendium is groundbreaking but complete unit histories of Schlachtgeschwaders like SG10, SG4 and SG3 are missing.

Best