NEW BOOK - LUFTWAFFE & THE WAR AT SEA

[DavidIsby]

Mr. Anton is certainly entitled to his opinions. Indeed, I share most of them. What he is not entitled to is his own facts.



The fact in question is: does the work in question meet the general industry standards for books of republished material?



Let’s look at the bookshelf in this subject matter area. I can see the US Air Force has published historical material without editorial commentary or apparatus bringing it up to date. Examples of this are the multi-volume Craven & Cate official history (the recent edition has a two-page introduction added to each volume) and the wartime AAF in Action Monographs. The Navy and the Army also publish post-war material without editorial commentary. These include the Department of the Army publications on German combat actions on the Eastern Front. The Garland Press editions of the Karlshrue studies and German postwar Army studies have no editorial commentary at all nor anyone’s name to hold responsible for the selection made. Looking at a couple of books, THE FIRST AND THE LAST by Adolf Galland and WINGED WARFARE by Billy Bishop, I see no one has provided the new editions with any apparatus or even raised a warning flag that the author was not actually under oath as to the truth of what they were saying. In fact, most publications of such material has no editorial additions, synthesis or value-added of any sort. So the works in question exceed industry standards.



Now, I believe annotating documents can be an excellent and most useful approach to history. Since Mr. Anton reads THE JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY I can direct his attention to the review I did a couple of years back on Les Grau’s annotated Russian General Staff study on Afghanistan, which was excellent. But it’s not the only way. If we had to follow Mr. Anton’s alleged standards, all the books should not have appeared. In reality, there will be multiple approaches to doing this. Just like there are books by Boog, Corum, Muller etc. as well as Ospreys.



Mr. Anton should certainly edit a collection of Luftwaffe accounts that, in his opinion, would meet his (and that’s what they are, HIS, not that expected of such works) requirements. If what results is reasonably priced, I will most likely buy a copy (as will, I suspect, most of the readers of this board. If you can do it better, please do so. My publisher would probably give you a contract. Mr. Anton is not entitled to say that material should remain out of print or only in microfilm in archives and thus unavailable to most of the readers of this board until it is tucked between hard covers to his satisfaction in company with what he sees as sufficient synthesis. If this inspires Mr. Anton to go and do as good a job of annotating and editing Luftwaffe material as Les Grau did on Afghanistan material, I am sure he will be as grateful to me as I was to Dr. Kitchen for calling my attention that including sourcing details would be a good idea.