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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting angle on the Stuka history, 9 Feb 2003
It feels as if Peter C Smith has written this book to clear the memory of the Stuka from the calumny of fighter jocks and ill-informed British and American historians.The Stuka is often described by aviation historians as a slow and vulnerable aircraft that had outlived its time by the Battle of Britain; Smith rather portrays a nimble, sturdy, versatile precision weapon with an impressive record - in truth he waxes quite panegyrical over both the aircraft and the crews that flew them, the Stuka comes across as the ultimate war weapon. British claims of Stukas shot down are contradicted by Smith using German loss records; on the other hand, some of the attacks on British airfields and such that Smith describes as extremely successful, catching the RAF with their trousers down, are downplayed by other historians as attacks on obsolete aircraft at second-line airfields, so one is left a bit confused here. The invasion of Crete is described as a great success by Smith, even though it was quite Pyrrhic in nature. In fact, after a while one gets the impression that Smith is a bit upset that the Germans lost the war despite being so clever and brave. (In fact the only even faintly bad thing said about the German regime in the book is at the end, when they are called a "ruthless dictatorship", but even then only to say Nazism was less so than Communism...) Attacks on British shipping are described in meticulous (not to say nauseating in some parts) detail. One is impressed not only by how hard the fighting was in areas that in many WWII histories are mentioned only in passing, but also by how huge the Royal Navy must have been at the time to survive such losses. The later history of the Stuka on the Eastern Front is not given in quite as fine detail, perhaps due to the lack of sources (most likely books such as "Black Cross/Red Star" will remedy this). The photographs are of good quality, though apparently with somewhat lower contrast than the originals, as many times features pointed out in the captions as clearly visible require some effort to make out. One would have wished for some three-view drawings to help with clarifying the distinctions between different variants of the Stuka. Still, this is a very readable book and in combination with more drawings-and-profiles oriented books such as, e g, John Weal's "Stukageschwader 1937-41", gives excellent depth to the subject.
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