NEW BOOK - LUFTWAFFE & THE WAR AT SEA

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Originally Posted by Tony Williams

An interesting contribution Adam. I am not a trained historian (beyond A-level anyway) but have spent much of my professional life collecting, analysing, evaluating and presenting information. Primary sources, such as are being discussed here, are clearly an essential part of historical research. However, the fun begins when primary sources disagree, as they often do.


Personally I welcome the publication of raw primary sources as such books save authors like me a lot of slogging through files, although they should perhaps come with a health warning to the general reader that the contents only represent what the originators of the documents thought at the time, and may have been contradicted by later research.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

I have also "spent much of my professional life collecting, analysing, evaluating and presenting information" just like Tony, and neither I am a historian beyond A-level, and I would love to have primary source material published, so I didn't have to wait 2 month for copies from Freiburg. But the interviews published in Fighting the Bombers are not primary source material. If the original German transcripts, devoid of spelling errors, erroneous geographical locations etc., had been published, the book would have been of value as a collection of source material. Now it suffers from a translation, which can only be graded D minus, and some of the interrogated personnel had an incorrect perception of facts and events. These accounts cannot be trusted without cross reference to original German documents on the same subject.

Did the Editor warn the reader about these limitations in his introduction? No and that I fell is Mr. Isby's cardinal sin.
bregds
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