Eagle Days: Life and Death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain

[Chris Goss]

I always have an input to my book covers albeit I don't always agree with the end result. As to academic qualifications, I am one of the rare ones having a Masters with Merit in War Studies from Kings College London. When I added to my thesis to produce Luftwaffe Fighter Bombers over Britain, was told I should have put this forward for a PhD!

[Nick Beale]

I added to my thesis to produce Luftwaffe Fighter Bombers over Britain

And it's greatly to your credit that it reads like a proper book. I've read a few theses about Second World War aviation (they're often online at the university concerned) and books based on them. The prevailing academic conventions seem to result in something a long way from anything that an 'outsider' would enjoy reading or even learn much from. Much of the object seems to be demonstrating how thoroughly familiar you are with the work already done by others in the field. For example, you can download Dr. Taylor's 'Après moi, le déluge : redressing the wartime and postwar mythologization of Operation CHASTISE in Britain' here: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4221081

To me, it just seemed that far more words were devoted to what other writers said (or didn’t) about the raid rather than presenting anything new that she might have unearthed from her own research.

[Larry]

Out of interest when was the first use of the Ju 87 Stuka over the UK in WW2. Somewhere I had seen rumours that Stukas attacked HMS Nelson in Scapa Flow, without result in Sptember 1939, as if the Luftwaffe was doing the same thing to our shipping as Bomber Command tried to do on Northern German ports in Sept 1939. Where would these Stukas fly from, for an attack on Orkney?

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by Larry

Out of interest when was the first use of the Ju 87 Stuka over the UK in WW2. Somewhere I had seen rumours that Stukas attacked HMS Nelson in Scapa Flow, without result in Sptember 1939, as if the Luftwaffe was doing the same thing to our shipping as Bomber Command tried to do on Northern German ports in Sept 1939. Where would these Stukas fly from, for an attack on Orkney?

A Ju 87 B with a 500 kg bombload had a radius of action of 250 km. Per Google Earth, it's 500 km from Stavanger in Norway to Scapa Flow which is the closest point but the Germans didn't get there until April 1940.

P.S. A Ju 87 R (which I don't think was available until early 1940) had a range of 1180–1320 km with a 500 kg bomb and two droptanks, depending on altitude and engine settings. To get a radius of action, the practice was to divide the max. range by three, so we're talking about 400–440 km., still not enough.