William Green (1) (1927–2010)

This is second book on FW190 I read this year. While previous one (Focke Wulf by Alfred Price) was more of a story driven work that nevertheless provided a lot of details, this one is very very heavy on the details and can be a dry read at some points (so many minor, major releases of this fighter are in play at one time you would need side-notes to keep track).

That being said there are some very beautiful cross-section-spreads of the most attractive FW190 versions and plethora of pretty show more good photographs and details (especially master detail shots of captured aircraft that were heavily tested by US and UK).

While I have a feeling that this entire admiration for German weapons and way of war is truly embarrassing for everyone from the Allied side, no matter how good military systems were, and this book is guilty of it as is about any other book on this subject, authors managed to strike balance with pretty straight-forward and blunt representation of the FW190 casualties as war moved to the conclusion. I also like how FW190 was not presented as the ultimate machine - it was always used hand in hand with the other high performing fighters like Bf109G/K.

FW190 was a truly great piece of machinery but, as history shows us over and over again, advanced technology means nothing if there is no human experience to use it. And this is what happened here - with high attrition old and experienced pilots were lost and noobs just could not keep up with the opposition that gained more and more experience and also started to outnumber the German fighters as time went by. This started to bring casualty rates so high that lots of squadrons were just withered down to few machines. And no smart design or improvement can make fighter plane fight without the pilot with cunning and experience.

Last chapter is excerpt from the report UK team wrote after analyzing the first captured aircraft. Wonderful level of details.

For all fans of combat aircraft and combat aircraft history, highly recommended. show less

This is what the title promises: a history of twelve classes of bombing aircraft in World War II. A second volume was eventually prepared, but it is clear that this was not envisioned at the time of the original writing.

If you consider only the European front, the list of bombers is fairly reasonable: four German (the Stuka, the Heinkel 111, the Dornier Do 17, the Junkers Ju 88), three British (the Wellington, the Lancaster, and the Mosquito), four American (the B-17 Flying Fortress, the show more B-24 Liberator, the B-25 Mitchell, and the B-26 Marauder), and one token Italian (the Sparviero).

The British list is obviously "correct" in the sense that those are their best three. The German list is a bit dubious in the sense that only the Stuka and the Junkers 88 were particularly effective (and even the Stuka was soon shown to be very vulnerable to fighters), and only the Ju 88 truly a great plane -- but the author had to do something to keep the numbers on each side relatively even. And, of course, he had to do something about the Italians.

What is obviously lacking in the list is the Pacific war: There are no Japanese planes. And how could one possibly omit the Douglas Dauntless that won the Battle of Midway? And no bomber, not even the Lancaster, was actually better than the B-29 Superfortress, which isn't listed. But if you accept that this book is only about the European war, then that isn't really an objection. Similarly, naval planes are omitted, but that may be acceptable in context.

What should probably be noted is that this is almost entirely a history of the planes' development, not of their operational use. You won't learn who bombed what when (with a few minor examples like the use of the Lancasters for "dam-busting" -- but even that involved rebuilding the planes, so it's arguably part of their engineering history rather than their war history). This isn't a defect, really, but it is something you should know; if you're looking for exciting stories of daring missions, you won't find them here.

Also, there isn't much head-to-head comparison of aircraft. Why, for instance, is the Wellington in here but not its contemporaries such as the Whitley? On paper, the Whitley was slightly faster and carried slightly more than the Wellington. So why did the Wellington stay in use so much longer? Answer: Because the Wellington was much more durable and easier to handle -- it was more likely to come back. But you don't see that sort of comparison here, so you don't really learn why these bombers, and not some others, became the Famous Bombers. That is something I genuinely miss. show less

For many years, William Green and Gordon Swanborough formed a writing team that produced voluminous, detailed, factual writing about aircraft. Their material was ubiquitous and comprehensive. This volume is from a series called "World War 2 Aircraft Fact Files" produced by Macdonald & Janes in the 1970s. It details all the significant - and some of the more obscure - aircraft of the day, as prescribed by the title. This volume covers the products of the Bell and Curtiss companies. There are show more detailed development and production histories, and a slightly broader account of each type's service record.

Before Wikipedia, this book and many others like it were the go-to source for any historical information on warplanes of the era. Colour is restricted to a two-page spread of representative profiles, but there are plenty of acceptable photographs and a number of three-views and some detailed cutaways. This book and its shelf-mates are never going to be classics of aviation literature - indeed, they do make rather dry reading - but they are comprehensive and worth acquiring if you ever see any. show less

Published in 1970, this is still the most comprehensive and complete reference for all of the aircraft developed in Nazi Germany prior to and during the Second World War. It includes the full range of aircraft from conceptual and prototypes to those that were mass produced with multiple model variants. It is beutifully illustrated with photographs and line drawings and describes the complete lifespan of every aircraft from initial specifications through design, production, testing, and show more operational employment. This is a master work written by one of the best authors on military aviation to ever be published. show less