Book Review: Robert Forsyth: Heinkel Units of World War 2 (published Osprey, July 2018)

[INM@RLM]

Alfred, if you read the review you will see that many of the corrections also apply to the He 177 title by Smith and Creek.

The Smith and Creek title also contains many other - for me - fundamental errors. Take the Werk-Nummer block reconstruction as an example area.

But this is the reality of history. Historians have to grade conflicting sources, select the best data and reject some of what they find as either unreliable or downright wrong. They also need to start by going and looking in all the obvious places first to put together some sort of outline as a foundation. Giving detailed sources is also an essential feature.

The basis of the historical method is to allow others to check the published conclusions by going to review the same sources that the historian has used. It's the same principle of repeatability as scientists use to document their experiments in detail so others can either reproduce the same results from scratch - or disprove what has been published.

Here we have lots that has been published that can be disproved by looking at good quality sources.

The reality is that the He 177 title by Smith and Creek is still an ESSENTIAL book for study of the He 177, and it did help move us forward, but it also contains its own copious share of errors and it is NOT a biblical authority.

Having to start from where you are, rather than where you'd like to be, is all just part of life. Welcome to the adventure!