Using Ultra to research the Luftwaffe

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by lpunktlpunkt

I just went through my documents and the list of HW5 files. I would need scans of the HW5 files with the following serial numbers

I think you misunderstood my earlier post. I can possibly help with individual messages if you can give me their serial numbers, not whole files.

By my count you want 104 files. If you worked Tuesday–Saturday at the National Archives (the days they are open) and did nothing but take photos of every page all day, you might get through that much in two or three weeks. After that you would have perhaps 450,000 images to read through for information you wanted and I cannot estimate how long that might take you. The alternative would be to spend much longer at the Archives, reading each page and only photographing messages directly relevant to your project. In choosing a subject spanning almost the entire war, you are facing an immense amount of work and even then the items referring to awards of medals would probably be much less than 1% of the total.

I am sorry if this is disappointing but I do not want to become, in effect, someone else's research assistant or to give away many years of work.

To offer some perspective, I have been researching at the National Archives since 1985, I started on DEFE3 ULTRA in 1989 and on the HW5 files in 2005. I usually spend 3–4 days each year there. This has been my hobby, undertaken in my free time (holidays, weekends) at my expense (travel, meals, hotels) for my pleasure and interest; the material I have gathered has been for my own projects, some complete, some in progress and others not yet started. I share a lot of the results freely through my website (maybe 300,000 words so far) and occasionally in answer to questions on this forum but I do not give away material in bulk.