Skyraider3D said:
Hood said:
As to future projects, I'd say if Crecy ever wants to revamp the German Secret Projects series, then you would be the ideal candidate in my view.
Comparing your two bookzines to some of the speculative and inaccurate GSP entries which are big on colour artists impressions but little real detail, shows what those books could, and should, have been.
Amen.
The original Midland Publishing GSP trilogy is fascinating, particularly how Schick, Herwig and their editors and translators handled the material, what they used and what they evidently had to hand but chose not to use. Although the three volumes are nicely tied together by their English edition cover artwork, really they're quite different from one another in character.
Luftwaffe Secret Projects Fighters 1939-1945 by Walter Schick is easily the best. Schick has done some research and presents a reasonably accurate set of information about the fighters and their background; but he fails to make clear the narrative structure into which they fit. For example, he discusses the Heinkel P 1078 on p151 and states that it resembles the B&V P 212 but does not state that it actually competed against it, despite mentioning the February 27/28 meeting at which they were compared.
This makes more sense when you consider that Schick originally wrote the German edition of the book in 1994. In his Messerschmitt Geheimprojekte, published two years later, he makes the link much more overt and on p83 shows the six 1-TL-Jager designs that were competing in January 1945. He's done more research, he understands it better (though he still doesn't seem to quite grasp the evolving nature of the competition) and he makes it clearer. But he's run out of time - he had died in the meantime, in 1995 aged 47.
A year after that (1997), the English edition of the 1994 work appears, edited by Ken Ellis and translated by Elke and John Weal, with additional input from Tony Buttler, Martin Derry and Jay Miller. It takes no account of the updates Schick made via Messerschmitt Geheimprojekte but nevertheless, it stands up pretty well overall considering.
Then four years after Schick's first volume, in 1998, the 72-year-old Dieter Herwig adds a second: Luftwaffe Secret Projects Strategic Bombers 1935-1945. I would suggest that Herwig is less interested in examining the bomber projects in context than he is in simply presenting as many as possible along with their projected dimensions and performance. In fairness to him, where most of Schick's 3-views were re-draws (something he corrects in Messerschmitt Geheimprojekte), most of Herwig's appear to be real-deal reproductions of originals. Yet sadly he demonstrably makes stuff up too. For example, the infamous map of New York on p46 is the one lifted from Sanger's rocketbomber proposal - yet it's presented as "an original OKL map dating from 1943".
His history of the Ju 287 on p50 is woeful and his account of the 'Daimler-Benz projects' on p77 betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the 'projects' were intended to work. Ditto the account of the He 343 on p81. On p102, some of the material on the Arado E 470 is accurate but then he tacks on the line "this project series, too, was rejected by the RLM without any further reason being given", which again indicates a misunderstanding of the original material.
The English language version duly followed two years later in 2000, translated by Elke and John Weal, and the factual anomalies of the original German version go unremarked upon.
Finally, we have Luftwaffe Secret Projects Ground Attack & Special Purpose Aircraft by Herwig. The German original appeared in 2002 and its content really only paid lip service to its title - most of it was about fighters or bombers that were missed out of the first two books. Basically he seems to have thrown in everything he had. He even has a second stab at the Arado E 560. In his bombers book, he'd written: "These project studies were among the last proposals to be submitted to the RLM in the final weeks leading up to the end of the war. Very few documents relating to them have survived." But then he goes right ahead and dates the E 560 designs as 1943/44 in the spec panels. Four years later (between German editions) on p102 of the Ground Attack book, he takes a much more detailed look at the E 560 (though he still doesn't really understand it).
What's most remarkable about this third volume, in the English version (2003), is Ted Oliver's input. Oliver not only translates it but also, for the first time, offers a running commentary which actually points out some of Herwig's errors and inconsistencies as it goes along. There's a 'publisher's note' on p7 which makes it plain that some of Herwig's original material was provably inaccurate, necessitating "some significant changes in sequence and content". Oliver doesn't seem to have had access to any original documents, but does have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that's been published so far by everyone else - some of which is apparently much more convincing than Herwig's material.
Then five years later (2008) Herwig himself died, aged 82 or thereabouts, bringing the series to an end as a trilogy.
Both Schick and Herwig did valuable work in bringing to light some projects which might otherwise have remained undiscovered but Herwig in particular also managed to muddy the waters with some glaring errors which have been repeated endlessly as fact by others ever since. He even included some of the dodgy 'animal names' Messerschmitt types in the ground attack book (p130-133). It's 20 years next year since the trilogy began (English version) and it'll be interesting to see what the future holds for these increasingly outdated, yet still undoubtedly popular, works.
