New Me 309 Book by Calum Douglas and Dan Sharp

Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules

rochie said:
Bacon is the duct tape of the kitchen !
Click to expand...
And that from a man that cookes quite a few things very very nicely.

Sillyness aside, do you do some bacon on some more advanced cookery?
Not the beans stuff. Had them, was yukkie but lasted me through a trail run.
Better then a nut bar wich costed me oh so much discrace. And a lot af leaves i might add.
Never again.

Nay the more civilized menu.

You have some?
 
Sisu said:
I have certainly been thinking that "Bacon" outranks "Winner". So I am wrong ?
Click to expand...
It is my take that 'winner' > 'bacon', but I'm okay with people saying that 'bacon' > 'winner'.
Sorta: is Spitfire > Bf109, or vice versa.
 
Risking hijacking the thread !
They contain bacon

Scallops, pea puree, bacon, baby potatoes and crispy pig skin.



Guinea fowl, cabbage, fondant potato, dried bacon wafer.

 
He regularly writes articles in Flugzeug Classic, a German aviation magazine specialised in old timer planes.
I wonder if he adds lots of new stuff or repeats things already previously written. Is there a continuous flow of new information coming out of the archives?
 
spicmart said:
There were others who have complained about Dietmar Hermann's book the way you described it.
Click to expand...

I have not seen the book but I would also be frustrated by such a book. Given its reputation it is one of the best, if not the very best, on the aircraft that is a great pity. Maybe someone can convince Mr Hermann to do a revised edition, with all the text in one section and a fully bibliography. For those like me who value the text more that the photos in most books he would then satisfy both kinds of readers, text base learners and graphics based learners.
 

Well, I am not a qualified "archive Mole" but, I have seen a fantastic trend towards primary document research. This has been a great improvement and I hope that more complete and accurate research will continue. Unfortunately, Covid restrictions caused many problems for researchers.
Dan Sharp is likely well qualified to comment!

Eng
 
Dan Sharp said:
Incidentally, I'm new to this forum. Can anyone tell me what a 'bacon' reaction means?
Click to expand...
To explain:
A couple of years ago there was a running joke on the forum how Bacon was the best food in the world. If you are willing to search you can find some of those threads still moderately active somewhere. As kind of an inside joke, the forum team at that time decided to add the bacon as one of the praises for a post. As people said here already, it's generally interpreted as the highest of praise for what someone wrote. So take it as a positive sign.
 

Hermann is good on Focke-Wulf generally. I'm not sure that there is 'new' material coming from the archives as such. What I've found is, various different researchers have worked in this field for a long time, such as J. Richard Smith, Eddie Creek, Robert Forsyth etc. and over the course of many years they have accumulated a lot of material which they may not have been able to use themselves. However, when another author comes along to write a book on, for example, the Ta 154, they may decide to give whatever relevant material they have to that author.
That author is then able to use the collected material of several people to create the book.
I myself am particularly indebted to Steve Coates for his assistance in my research overall and on my Me 328 book in particular.
 
Last edited:

If you write a book and you rely on information from someone else's book (tertiary source) rather than primary sources, you're running an awful risk - particularly if that book doesn't cite its sources and just states everything as fact.

For example, there's one particular WW2 aviation book that came out fairly recently, written by an academic, which won a prize. I bought it, and when I looked through the long list of fully cited sources, I was surprised to discover that a lot of the references were to other people's books which I own and which I know 1) don't cite any sources themselves and 2) can be shown to be inaccurate, based on primary sources I've seen.

So this award-winning book, by a qualified academic, was actually a house of cards. The author had taken at face value some highly questionable texts and built their argument on them. In my view, this compromised their book and undermined the otherwise good work they had done. Others may disagree, and perhaps argue it's inevitable that historians must at some point place their trust in the accuracy of other history writers (even those writing at a time before digital cameras and scanners).

Another example - there is a newish series of books on German aviation up to and during WW2 which has been well-reviewed and is regarded as a valuable treasure trove of 'facts'. I bought a volume from the series and discovered that the author had not cited any individual sources whatsoever. There was a bibliography of other people's works, but none of the 'facts' in the book were even so much as linked to page numbers. Once again, the book contained numerous instances of demonstrable inaccuracies, based on primary source evidence.

Later, when perusing Twitter, I saw a qualified doctor of history posting about all the research they were doing for their latest work. Guess what was there amongst the pile of other people's books they were using for reference? The historian in question was clearly happy to accept the contents of that book - even though it apparently wasn't based on any primary sources at all.

My Me 262, Me 309 and Me 328 books are based (almost) entirely on primary sources. It's very surprising what you can learn by taking this approach. Me 309 didn't really have any competition - no one else has ever really bothered to look at it - but with Me 262 I gathered thousands of primary source documents, then set out to answer every question I could in other people's books and resolve every inconsistency. Where did the swept wings come from (a measure to resolve c.g. issues or something else)? Were there really cheering crowds after the first successful test flight under Jumo 004 power? Was there really a 'second' series of prototypes numbered V1-V12? Did Hitler really demand that it should be a bomber? If he did, why would he do that? Why was the Me 262 so slow to enter service? Was there a shortage of engines? etc. etc. The primary sources can provide convincing answers to all these questions. And if others have tried to answer these questions another way, but haven't provided any source references, which answer is more convincing?
 
My research covers a lot of primary sources that are very questionable like USAAF pilots in Batavia recording that they were dogfighting with Me-109 and He-100 fighters and shooting down various Ju and He bombers. Fortunately it is blindingly obvious they are full of themselves and brown stuff but some authors love that crap and print it like it is fact.

It is those extra steps that you are taking like Where did the swept wings come from (a measure to resolve c.g. issues or something else)? Were there really cheering crowds after the first successful test flight under Jumo 004 power? Was there really a 'second' series of prototypes numbered V1-V12? Did Hitler really demand that it should be a bomber? If he did, why would he do that? that make the difference between a "rumour writer" for want of a better title and a "factorian" for want of another better title.

Congratulations for always going the extra mile.
 

Seeing what the primary sources say on points like those is what makes writing these particular books interesting for me. Trying to find the answer to any given question using unsourced books is an enormous pain - one book says one thing, another book says something else, neither of them says where they got their info from.

Clearly primary sources can be just as inaccurate as secondary and tertiary sources. However, something like a Messerschmitt test flight report is a technical document. It says which aircraft was flown, who flew it, when they took off, when they landed, what the weight of the aircraft was on take-off, where the centre of gravity was set, what the purpose of the flight was, how the aircraft handled, any complaints about how it flew etc. It seems highly unlikely that the report author would lie - there would be no repercussions for saying something negative about the aircraft - quite the reverse, since identifying faults and fixing them is the whole point of doing it.

So if you can find such technical documents - ideally a full set - from captured document sets, you have a reasonably good idea of how an aircraft's test flight programme progressed. Internal company memos need careful interpretation, because someone like Willy Messerschmitt didn't always give all of his staff the full picture of what was really going on. This is particularly evident with the Me 309, where Messerschmitt was saying one thing to one person, but something different to someone else.

Stenographic transcripts of high-level German Air MInistry (RLM) meetings are another primary source to be handled with care. These come from Erhard Milch's personal files, captured and microfilmed by the British, and therefore do at least present a reliable account of what was said at those meetings. Whether what was said was actually true, and why such things were said, when they were said, how they were said etc, is open to interpretation - which is possible, I think, in the context of thousands of other documents from multiple contemporaneous sources on the same topic. You can argue that lies or half-truths were told - because you can see that different information was being distributed outside those meetings - or you can argue that someone was plainly telling the truth for the same reasons. What's largely undeniable, though, is that what appears in those transcripts is what was actually said.

Operational materials - heat of the battle type stuff - isn't really my area of expertise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)

Similar threads

E
MESSERSCHMITT ME309 Development and Politics. Dan Sharp & Calum Douglas
2
Replies
30
Views
3K
Engineman
E
S
Ta 152 book by Thomas Hitchcock
Replies
1
Views
758
Weizenbrot
W
I
New Dambuster Lancaster digital walkaround book
Replies
0
Views
421
ian_
I
A
Books and Magazines
Replies
0
Views
490
Alex Smart
A
Used book prices
Replies
8
Views
1K
MiTasol
Menu
Log in
Register