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

[John Vasco]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

2. What I mean by a list is what I'm continually stopping myself from doing, just putting down each KTB item, radio message, ORB entry in sequence and letting the reader work it out. I LOVE this stuff but normal readers probably no so much, and so authors craft the raw data into a narrative, trying to make sense of it. Yes, you are trying to not to distort the original but you inevitably do something more than simply compile, e.g. drawing attention to omissions, discrepancies, apparent errors etc. You may even draw conclusions but—and I think we agree here—you do not make stuff up ("Göring would have thought …" etc.).

4. Me too because I found his analysis clear and well-argued.

I do believe we are on the same page, Nick!
You will see from the content of my book on Erprobungsgruppe 210, and the 'Zerstörer' book with Peter Cornwell, that the narrative contains details of combats and damage/losses, as well as tables of the same. I think this works in two ways: 1. The reader can see the losses/damaged as they read through the text, or, 2. if they want to examine the losses/damaged as a single entity, to see how hard the type or units were hit on a particular day/week, it is there for them also.