Market research - 'Most Wanted' Luftwaffe books

[egbert]

Flak, Flak and again Flak.
Unit histories, photos, composition, deployments

[rickback4444]

Hi,

I'd like to see more unit histories in English - a bit like JJF publishing who do a lot of English translations of classic German texts plus individual histories of Luftwaffe field divisions.

Rick

[Steve Coates]

Personally, I'd like to see more books on type development, particularly the 'cinderella' companies like Klemm.

[Adriano Baumgartner]

A lot of recent "War Diaries" or biographies of former LW airmen have been published in Germany - in German (ex-KG 100, ex StG 77 airmen, etc.)
Maybe some good translations to English would expand this kind of literature around the Globe.

I do agree that it would be nice to have further UNIT STORIES like that already and acclaimed published of StG 2 and KG 100 (ROBA), JG 53 (PRIEN), JG 52 (BARBAS), JG 300 (JY LORANT), JG 2 (MONBEEK).

KG 30, KG 40, KG 55, StG 77, JG 1 and other units for instance.

Am aware that a KG 6 and KG 66 History will see "light" in a near futur and we are awaiting for that.

A.

[MW Giles]

You need to look a little bit harder, Martin...

John

I have nearly all your books; Zerstorer is one of my favourites that I re-read from time to time.

If only you could do something like that for the whole war I would be a very happy man.

Martin

[hucks216]

Originally Posted by egbert

Flak, Flak and again Flak.
Unit histories, photos, composition, deployments

Totally agree. A multi volume series of flak unit histories, not necessarily one unit per book but a history of their deployments etc.

[Chris Goss]

Trouble is that many unit members are no longer with us and the effort to produce a new unit history would be massive with the risk that sales would not recoup the effort and outlay. However, a complete history of KG 40 (Fw 200, He 111, Do 217, Ju 88, He 177) is a tempting proposition! BTW, JG 1 and KG 55 have been written and KG 6 done twice in German by two different authors and once in French by another author

[richdlc]

hijacking my own thread here, but a detailed history in English of the Flugzeugwerke Eger would be interesting. Done a lot of reading about it, but only in Czech so far

[Nick Beale]

Having made isolated ventures into book-writing, some comments on the suggestions so far:

Ed: A book of unpublished photos. That's why I collect Luftwaffe im Focus.

Me too, but Lw. in Focus also does a brilliant job of explaining just what we're looking at and that's important to me as well (e.g. the Ta 152 article in issue No. 29). Realistically, the stock of unpublished photos must be decreasing, mustn't it? In that context, I think there's still scope for better interpretation (and computer-assisted enhancement) of the ones we already know. So, I'd favour really thorough captions wherever possible.

Steve: Unit histories, as detailed as possible, especially for units for which there is no unit history.

Again I agree but sources are the problem, especially now that veterans are no longer here to be interviewed and for me the human aspect is very important. Some units' asignments prove quite repetitive so you do need to find unusual incidents to break the routime.

Martin: My only bugbear - histories that take 450 pages to get to the end of 1942 and then 20 pages to complete the path to 1945.

That sounds like why I got into research in the first place! Pierre Clostermann's The Big Show planted the idea that there were months of very active fighting that no one seemed to write about beyond "and then the fuel ran out and Germany surrendered". I'm actually more interested in how the Germans lost than in the "years of triumph" angle.

Martin: covering Lw units - how they were formed, where they were based, what types they operated and when, a brief potted history of the unit and then what units it morphed into when its role changed or it disbanded.

Into the labyrinth! Working out how to present this in a way that anyone without the brain of a particle physicist can understand is a bit of a problem as everything seems to have been in flux all the time. Animated graphics maybe?

Final point: how willing are people to buy a book that tells a new and interesting story for which few, if any, photos exist?

[alessandro bray]

Hallo,
Personally i'd like to see unit histories on Schlachtgeschwader units with good test coverage for the 43-45 timeframe. Maybe the availability of russian archives can give a better pictures of their real impact in term of effective tactical support, tank disable etc....
Alessandro