Heinkel He 111: An Illustrated History. Design - Development - Variants - Operations - Equipment

[Jukka Juutinen]

Nick, publishing is business, however, that is no explanation to everything. I have not seen this book yet, but, from the comments expressed so far it seems that the subtitle of the book is very much misleading. As the subtitle is Design - Development - Variants - Operations - Equipment, one would well expect the contents to be approx. equally shared. Yet, apparently the technical side is very skimpy and the vast majority is devoted to operations. And here it went south.

If the publisher assessed that e.g. a 5-volume set is not feasible, then what was needed is called priorization. There is an old military maxim "if you defend everything, you do not defend anything". In other words, one should have never, NEVER, attempted to cover everything within a single volume of 336 pages. Instead, there should have been a clear focus, and that focus should have been what has not been covered in any substantial detail before: design and development. Thus the book should have been "He 111 - An Illustrated Study: Design and Development".

The coverage should have focused entirely on He 111's design and development emphasizing engineering and piloting PoV with analyses on manufacturing, testing, aerodynamics, systems, handling and performance. I.e. something similar to Christoph Vernaleken's Ju 388 book. And in this 336 pages would have allowed significant detail.

The situation with WW2 aircraft monographs in general is exceedingly annoying for those more technically minded readers. For some unfathomable reason, vacuum cleaner (aka jet) enthusiasts are provided with books that have great engineering detail and analysis, but piston aircraft enthusiasts are treated like Dummköpfe: simplistic text devoid of technical analysis coupled with plenty of nice photos and maximum amount of colour (te none of the colour is used for e.g. fuel system schematics). In Luftwaffe case, one does only need to compare books on the Me 262, He 162, Me 163 to books on any LW piston aircraft.