New Me 309 Book by Calum Douglas and Dan Sharp

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Dan Sharp said:
Thanks for the kind words.

I do think it would be difficult to argue against the notion that Willy Messerschmitt deliberately set out to get a promising airframe cancelled for reasons of his own. Had he been fully behind it, and had the Me 262 not been rescued from obscurity when it was by Galland, Milch and even Goering (contrary to what he would say later, Willy Messerschmitt was actually against building it in quantity until the Me 209 II had finally been killed off for good), there could easily have been 309s flying in large numbers by the end of the war.

But if someone was determined enough, they might just be able to push the idea that ultimately the Me 309 died because the RLM didn't turn over enough resources to Messerschmitt and he was forced to concoct an alternative 603/213 vehicle using whatever he had to hand.

In interpretation 1, Messerschmitt is a contriver and a manipulator; in interpretation 2 he is merely a put-upon pragmatist. I can see plenty of people preferring to view him as the latter.
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Well, I suspect that there was a bit of both! As a prolific designer, a leader of a large industrial company who survived many serious situations and thrived in a hugely demanding and dangerous political period, he was no doubt a formidable character in his prime. If you look at how the German Third Reich Political gangsters devoured the Junkers company, while Messerschmitt himself maintained a high control of his company, despite the failures, I think you can appreciate how he must have been strong. But, just like Germany could not win the War by ideology, mass murder and strutting around, Messerschmitt could not produce all the aircraft and obtain the suitable engines for many of his wartime designs after 1940.

Cheers

Eng
 
Engineman said:
Well, I suspect that there was a bit of both! As a prolific designer, a leader of a large industrial company who survived many serious situations and thrived in a hugely demanding and dangerous political period, he was no doubt a formidable character in his prime. If you look at how the German Third Reich Political gangsters devoured the Junkers company, while Messerschmitt himself maintained a high control of his company, despite the failures, I think you can appreciate how he must have been strong. But, just like Germany could not win the War by ideology, mass murder and strutting around, Messerschmitt could not produce all the aircraft and obtain the suitable engines for many of his wartime designs after 1940.

Cheers

Eng
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Messerschmitt was a talented leader but was also obstinate and had difficulty in ever accepting that he was wrong about anything. He wasn't entirely a designer, in the same way that Kurt Tank wasn't really a designer. They set parameters - 'we need an aircraft with these features and this engine' - and would then very firmly critique the work of the guys who did the actual designing. They would try to meet his demands, present him with the new version, and he'd then critique it again and so on. Does that make him a designer? Maybe, maybe not.
You're right to highlight his control over the Messerschmitt company as a private concern. He was unique in being able to do this thanks to his 'friends in high places'. Hitler held him in extremely high regard personally - but more than that, Hitler had given him the German National Prize for Art and Science in 1938. This was the German analogue for the Nobel Prize. And if Hitler had given it to you, he was acknowledging that you were a genius. If you went up against someone holding that prize, you were going up against Hitler. Secondly, Messerschmitt was in a relationship throughout the war with Baroness Lilly von Michel-Raulino, one of the wealthiest women in Germany and leader of the group of investors who controlled a majority stake in the Messerschmitt company (Willy Messerschmitt had a fairly sizable chunk of it himself). These investors were some of the same people who were bankrolling the Nazi party. So, with both of these factors in combination, Willy Messerschmitt was largely untouchable.
 
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I've read that Robert Lusser, the chief designer of many Messerschmitt planes like the Bf 108, Bf 109, Bf 110, Me 209 etc. actually loathed Willy and considered his boss a second-tier designer who, without his knack to form economic relations, would have ended some plain-Jane engineer in some lower-rung aviation bureau.
Messerschmitt's obsession for lightweight construction in order to maximize performance led to some mid-air disintegrations and fatalities.
Erhard Milch lost friends in those and would try to battle Willy throughout his tenures.
 
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spicmart said:
I've read that Robert Lusser, the chief designer of many Messerschmitt designs like the Bf 108, Bf 109, Bf 110, Me 209 etc. actually loathed Willy and considered his boss a second-tier designer who, without his knack to form economic relations, would have ended some plain Jane designer in some lower-rung bureau.
Messerschmitt's obsession for lightweight construction in order to maximize performance led to some mid-air disintegrations and fatalities.
Erhard Milch lost friends in those and would try to battle Willy throughout his tenures.
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Lusser may have been right about Messerschmitt as a designer. Even as the politically unassailable leader of one of Germany's most important companies during the war, he made some highly questionable decisions. Then again, he was also in an incredibly difficult position and did have a very strained relationship with Milch.
On that point, the interaction between the various parties concerned with aircraft procurement in Germany during the Second World War was complicated and I'm not sure anyone has yet managed to provide a convincing overall analysis of it.
Both Udet and Milch tried to provide the Luftwaffe with exactly what the Luftwaffe asked for, rather than taking a more balanced and objective approach. Those Luftwaffe officers involved in procurement, however, seem to have frequently lacked a technical understanding of aircraft development and made unrealistic demands - which then placed first Udet and then Milch in the awkward position of trying to meet those demands - even though doing so was often counterproductive and detrimental to the overall war effort.
Udet is almost universally panned for his management of procurement, yet if you ignore criticisms of his personal habits etc. and look at what he achieved: it cannot be denied that almost every military aircraft which saw service with the Luftwaffe during WW2 was developed on his watch, even 'newer' types such as the Me 262, Ar 234, Me 163, He 219 etc. were under development when he removed himself from the equation.
What did Milch achieve? One of his first actions was to try, unsuccessfully, to get Willy Messerschmitt removed from his own company. This unfortunate episode weakened his position, particularly with Hitler, to the point where - when Galland, Milch and Goering tried to get the Me 262 rushed into production in May 1943, Messerschmitt was able to go to Hitler and get the plan quashed so he could build the Me 209 II instead. When Messerschmitt pitched the Me 109 Z for the 'Schnellbomber' competition (which might have been an easy-to-build, quickly-into-service Twin Mustang equivalent), his offering was rejected, perhaps at the behest of Milch, in favour of the Do 335 - which was highly complex and therefore had not entered service by the end of the war.
Milch also took years to cancel a host of pointless development programmes - purely because he doesn't seem to have felt strong enough to stand up to the Luftwaffe and stop them sooner. Perhaps the worst offender is the Ju 288. The He 177 should also, arguably, have been canned as soon as he took office. But the Luftwaffe demanded it. He initiated the Ta 154 programme based on an idea from industrialist William Werner to use up surplus Jumo 211 engines - but that plan was really a failure from start to finish.
I would say, therefore, that Milch's tenure was characterised by weakness and that he was really no better than Udet - perhaps worse, even.
 
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spicmart said:
Do you see the need to or will you tackle the Ta 154 someday?
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p44-45 of Secret Projects of the Luftwaffe includes a stenographic transcript of the meeting where the Ta 154 came into being. I thought it was interesting to see the way it played out - Werner seems to have been quite a charismatic individual.

Dietmar Hermann's 2021 Ta 154 book doesn't have that in it (I don't think it mentions Werner in fact - correct me if I'm wrong!), but it does have practically every known photo of a Ta 154 in it.

If I were to write a history of the Ta 154, the text would be significantly longer and more detailed - who knows what I would discover once I got stuck into it - but then I would run into the issue which seems to so infuriate BOBO with the Me 309 book: text/image balance.

With Hermann's book, I actually struggled to find the text in order to read the story - such was the profusion of images and the subordination of poor Hermann's text to them. In some instances, you'd get a sliver of his text, then two full spreads of pics without any text, then the text would continue briefly, wedged up in a corner around a whole load more images, then you'd get a couple more full spreads of images with no text etc. And there are lots of very lengthy captions to those images. So you're hunting around, trying to find where the rest of the story is. You see a long caption - is that where the story continues? Nope, keep looking. BUT if images are the only reason you bought the book, you could not be better served - it's an absolute treasure trove of photographs.

I would never be able to top that book for images and I dread to consider how much must have been spent to acquire them all (the expense presumably mandating the inclusion of every last one!). The text I wrote, if I were to write it, would be all based on fully referenced primary sources (Hermann gives a short list of source documents at the back, perhaps half a page, but doesn't give any archival references, so you've no way of checking whether what he's written is correct) - but a very significant proportion of people who buy aircraft books do so purely for the images and don't care to know where the information has come from (though curiously BOBO seems to care, even if he failed to notice the hundreds of fully referenced sources listed in Me 309 Development & Politics).

Where would that leave my theoretical Ta 154 book? People who appreciate 'the words' might get something interesting out of it - but I'm sure there would be an equal number who would complain most vociferously that it was lacking in photos and artist's redrawings of the real contemporary drawings, that the font used wasn't to their taste, that the text was too long etc.

Secret Projects of the Luftwaffe small.jpg
 
Dan Sharp said:
p44-45 of Secret Projects of the Luftwaffe includes a stenographic transcript of the meeting where the Ta 154 came into being. I thought it was interesting to see the way it played out - Werner seems to have been quite a charismatic individual.

Dietmar Hermann's 2021 Ta 154 book doesn't have that in it (I don't think it mentions Werner in fact - correct me if I'm wrong!), but it does have practically every known photo of a Ta 154 in it.

If I were to write a history of the Ta 154, the text would be significantly longer and more detailed - who knows what I would discover once I got stuck into it - but then I would run into the issue which seems to so infuriate BOBO with the Me 309 book: text/image balance.

With Hermann's book, I actually struggled to find the text in order to read the story - such was the profusion of images and the subordination of poor Hermann's text to them. In some instances, you'd get a sliver of his text, then two full spreads of pics without any text, then the text would continue briefly, wedged up in a corner around a whole load more images, then you'd get a couple more full spreads of images with no text etc. And there are lots of very lengthy captions to those images. So you're hunting around, trying to find where the rest of the story is. You see a long caption - is that where the story continues? Nope, keep looking. BUT if images are the only reason you bought the book, you could not be better served - it's an absolute treasure trove of photographs.

I would never be able to top that book for images and I dread to consider how much must have been spent to acquire them all (the expense presumably mandating the inclusion of every last one!). The text I wrote, if I were to write it, would be all based on fully referenced primary sources (Hermann gives a short list of source documents at the back, perhaps half a page, but doesn't give any archival references, so you've no way of checking whether what he's written is correct) - but a very significant proportion of people who buy aircraft books do so purely for the images and don't care to know where the information has come from (though curiously BOBO seems to care, even if he failed to notice the hundreds of fully referenced sources listed in Me 309 Development & Politics).

Where would that leave my theoretical Ta 154 book? People who appreciate 'the words' might get something interesting out of it - but I'm sure there would be an equal number who would complain most vociferously that it was lacking in photos and artist's redrawings of the real contemporary drawings, that the font used wasn't to their taste, that the text was too long etc.

View attachment 781908
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There were others who have complained about Dietmar Hermann's book the way you described it.
I for myself was just happy to have a good monograph (others seem only to repeat the known stuff about and flaws of the Ta 154 and Hermann seems to stand up for the design) about this plane though I would have wished more "text". There you might come into play.
Hermann maybe assumed the reader of his book to be familiar enough with the plane so that he could jump around the way he wrote.
The lack of thorough referencing primary sources is a pity.
And I don't remember as well to have read Werner's name anywhere in it.
 
spicmart said:
There were others who have complained about Dietmar Hermann's book the way you described it.
I for myself was just happy to have a good monograph (others seem only to repeat the known stuff about and flaws of the Ta 154 and Hermann seems to stand up for the design) about this plane though I would have wished more "text". There you might come into play.
Hermann maybe assumed the reader of his book to be familiar enough with the plane so that he could jump around the way he wrote.
The lack of thorough referencing primary sources is a pity.
And I don't remember as well to have read Werner's name anywhere in it.
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There can be absolutely no doubt that Hermann's is the best book - by far - on the Ta 154 in existence. And the images used are excellent. It's an extremely high quality product and cheap too. The lack of referenced sources is, as you say, unfortunate because it robs the book of the level of historical authority it ought to command. I'm sure Hermann has the references and it wouldn't have eaten up much extra space to just include them. Odd that they were left out.

Although the original idea for the 'Ta 211' coming from Werner, and the peculiar way in which the project was launched, and the fact that taking on this 'special task' appears to be why Kurt Tank was allowed to put 'Ta' on Focke-Wulf designations from that point on, aren't mentioned by Hermann - you don't necessarily need to know those things to understand the aircraft's development - it's just additional 'flavour'.

The text-to-images ratio and the resulting imbalance throughout is a real shame. If you supply a designer with far too many images and insist that all of them are used - and used as large as possible no matter what - you end up with page after page that is nothing but images. The text then has to be thinly eked out as much as possible, so that even when there are pages with text on, it isn't much text. I do wonder how much control Hermann actually had over that layout, given that the book did have a 'project editor' and was produced indepentently of Crecy, who were then only responsible for publishing it.

I suppose we were fortunate, in a way, with Messerschmitt Me 309 Development & Politics (though BOBO would vehemently disagree!) that there aren't many surviving photos of the Me 309 in existence. I think we used every single known photo and period drawing of the Me 309 in the book - and some previously unknown ones - and that actually resulted in a reasonable balance of about 200 images against an 84,000w manuscript - about 420w per image.

With beefier text and full historical references - full transparency - Hermann's Ta 154 book could've been an absolute and unassailable masterpiece. As it is, the door has been left somewhat ajar for a greater understanding of the Ta 154 in some future work. Whether I or someone else would ever kick it open remains to be seen. Perhaps Hermann himself will, in a future edition, add the references and expand the text to better accompany all those images, creating the ultimate Ta 154 reference work. He is, after all, the go-to expert on all things Focke-Wulf and I look forward to seeing what he has in store for us next.
 
tomo pauk said:
'Bacon' is kida 'double like'.
Or, halfway from the 'like' and the 'winner' medal if you wish.
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I have certainly been thinking that "Bacon" outranks "Winner". So I am wrong ?
 
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