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Re: La Kampfgeschwader 100. L'Escadre au Drakkar (1938-1944).
I've just finished « La Kampfgeschwader 100 »: 39€ + postage well spent but it does have a few oddities. Plus-points include masses of photos, many colour profiles (an Ar 196 included) and a good overview of the unit's history, emphasising that many of the units under the KG 100 umbrella had precious little connection with one another in practice. The accounts of operations over North Africa and the USSR were almost entirely new to me. I only ever had a brief loan of Ulf Balke's book on the unit, and only used it for a specific bit of research, so I can't offer a comparison of the two.
Inevitably—and forgivably—there are some glitches in the text (1943 for 1944, Portsmouth for Plymouth) but there are two instances, in the text and a photo caption, where Fritz-X and Hs 293 are written when the other is intended. Elsewhere, Roba quotes Ulf Balke regarding an attack on London , "on the bank of the Thames between Cleslen and Vauxhall." A misreading of a Flugbuch entry for Clapham? There's a large selection of photos but the captions are a bit basic: there's no discussion of the different camouflage schemes on view, the differing Do 217 models shown or an He 177 with the unusual twin-MG 131 tail turret.
For me, book's biggest oddity is it treatment of my pet topic, Ultra intelligence. Roba doesn't see it as the patient accumulation of fragments of data; time and again, he writes of the Allies being warned of KG 100 operations and being able to inflict heavy losses on the attackers. I can't claim to have read, understood and remembered every message relating to the missions in question but at the moment I can't recall such a warning where KG 100 is concerned. There are plenty of cases where details were picked up after the operation in question but the instances where everything was known far enough beforehand to take countermeasures are few and far between, whichever units were involved. He doesn't give sources that would account for his interpretation, except for one file relating to a raid on Ajaccio in 1943, so it's hard to know what to make of his claims.
The narrative rather peters out once France is liberated, without any context (a few sentences would have sufficed) about the dissolution of much of the bomber force in the face of crew and fuel shortages and the turning over of production to fighters. Overall though, the positives well outweigh the drawbacks.
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7th September 2015, 01:10
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