Are there some nits? Of course. There are large numbers of schematics and keyed drawings that are regrettably missing the key. On page 373, the author mentions a potential shortage of 100 octane fuel and thoughtfully provides a copy of the original message. What variant of "100 octane" was it? Was this shortage for all of Europe? The tactical air forces? Did it include operations by the 8th Air Force? Is it, 100 octane, 100/130, 115/145, or 150?
There is no bibliography as such, but the footnoting runs about sixteen pages of what appears to be a size 6 font.
Thanks for the nice review, a some general points to try to explain areas you found difficult.
1) Which specific image did you feel needed a key ? The only ones I`m aware of that I omitted on purpose are a few exploded views from assembly manuals etc where I`ve not bothered redoing the key which says stuff like "26) Bolt... 27) Stud..... 28) Pin..." as its usually fairly self explanatory and would have needed another half page to fit.
2) Its a shortage for the Normandy Landings support operations, so yes, its a shortage in all of Europe. Letters like that often tend not to go into details like which exact variant, e..g. 100/130, but yes, it is referring to 100/130, which was at that point the "standard" service fuel in Europe.
3) Its worth noting for others reading that the "footnoting" you refer to, is the References section at the end, which is about 1250 references almost entirely of primary archive materials. The reason that there is no Bibliography, is essentially because other than a tiny smattering of properly researched books like "Vees for Victory" I did not use any information from other books. So I couldn't really make a Bibliography, as it would have had a grand total of perhaps nine books in it and so look a bit odd, so the very few books I did make use of (mostly autobiographies), are in the references.
Some of the images are indeed too small for my liking, and I would have liked to lengthen the book to allow them to be stretched, and the references text made bigger, but for commercial reasons I couldn't make that happen. I actually cut about 115 images from the book to provide space to increase the size of them all as much as feasible, but, as you can see, there are still a huge number of images and the book ended up so big that what you have, was about the best compromise I could make. Perhaps in a future 2nd ed. we can try to have the book lengthened (you can only do it in chunks of something like 25 pages).
4) The question of units is indeed a difficult one. Generally, of course they should all be standardised, however... something like half the entire book is quotes from original reports, or
stenographic records which are from spoken word. I took the view that the book would have looked a bit odd if I show a conference in Berlin with people like Erhard Milch saying "I want another 5 PSI of supercharger boost for the Me 109!", or Ernest Hives saying "The Spitfire needs another 100 PS at 8000m altitude!". That leaves a problem, so I decided to leave units as they originally were, talk around them, and make the compromise that the reader is expected to be able to work his or her way around it with a bit of diligence. Another issue was that if I had made the book in SI units, everyone in the USA would have complained, and visa versa. So, I thought the approach used, at least preserves the authenticity of the original reports, and allows everyone to muddle through with a bit of work. I had a look at providing comparisons, but the book`s readability was poor if you have "0.5ata /0.49Bar/7.1PSI" and that sort of thing after every value. Note, that this is one reason I made chapter 10, which gives a set of charts showing the broad progress made by all manufacturers all in one common set of units on charts of all identical scales. At least giving a wrapping-up where no head-scratching is needed.
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Anyway, I`m pleased that despite some niggles you enjoyed it.
