Customer Reviews

Warplanes of the Third Reich

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Originally published by New Impression in 1972, William Green has produced the ultimate guide for researchers who study the facts and details behind the ultimate failure of the Luftwaffe to win World War Two!
With all due respects to the History and Discovery Channels, Bill Green puts the lie to the History Channel's program asserting that the Messerchmitt ME 264 was going to be used to drop a radiological WMD on New York in late 1944. In fact it was 5 Heinkel He 177A-7's that were going to drop NERVE GAS on New York in a suicidal attack. This was later cancelled when General Patton's 3rd Army was about to over run the German air base at Bordeaux-Me'rignac!
As for the frequently mentioned theory that Hitler's insistance that Me 262 jet fighters be used as bombers was the reason that the Germans quickly lost the airwar over Europe, Green dumps that allegation into the toliet on Page 7 of this book in the Preface. The jet engines the Germans were using had a life of ten hours before they had to be completely overhauled! A fact that escapes most of the cable channel TV shows!
One facinating story from the book is the fact that a six engined Junkers Ju 390 V3 bomber in January 1944 flew from Mont de Marsan France to within 12 miles of the New York coast and returned to France in a non-stop flight of 31 hours! This aircraft weighed in at 166,450 lbs, fully loaded.
If you love technical details combined with a amusing view of the characters involved in the German Aircraft industry in WW-II, you will love this book.

William Green spent many years interviewing the principle characters who were responsible for building the German Air Force in World War II. Ernst Heinkel wrote an introduction for this book. For those of us who regard Green as the father of Military Technology Historians, This book is the final authority on the technical specifications and technical understanding of why Hitler lost World War II (thank God!)

This is a classic book on German WWII military aircraft.
It is excellent, but DO NOT buy the more recent, cheap US-printed versions.
I had one, but made this purchase (used book) to get a Doubleday fourth impression of 1979, printed in Great Britain. Why?--compare the photos. There is much photo detail in this fourth impression (made on better paper) that is just missing on cheaper reprints.

Despite dating from the early 1970's this book is the #1 reference book on German Aircraft of WW II. Planes are listed alphabetically by their German manufacturer so all the planes made by Horton, Junkers, etc are easy to find. By the way I have the second (1972 edition) and I have seen the first edition from 1970 and the two editions are identical. Both printed on good paper stock.

This book offers very detailed information related to the design and development of the many warplanes of Hitler's Germany. Green presents a good selection of photos of the aircraft with quite a few cutaway drawings and 3-views for almost all. This is a great resource for modelers.

This is a fantastic book. I originally bought one when it was first published. I loaned it out a few years ago and the person I loaned it to departed town without returning my book. I was more than delighted to find it on Amazon and I am grateful that was able to replace it. It is a must for WWII histrory buffs, aviation histrory buff and scale model builders. Thank you Amazon.

Everything that has been written by previous reviewers is absolutely spot-on! If aircraft of the Luftwaffe is your bag, and you want to know who, what, why, when, where and how about those aircraft, this is the one-stop shop despite dating from the early 1970s.

If there is a criticism (and I'm being unfairly harsh here) it's the lack of colour. A vast amount of colour film was exposed featuring aircraft of the Luftwaffe during the war, and there are surely numerous colour photos that could have been used in this volume - but hey! It's another brilliant William Green magnum opus that is unlikely to be equalled, much less surpassed or superseded.

Luftwaffe buffs - do yerselves a huge favour and seek this one out (if you haven't already done so). There is no way you'll be disappointed.

(With much appreciation to previous reviewers who inspired my purchase)

Warplanes of the Third Reich is simply the best book on the subject, hands down. The amount of research done on each aircraft is daunting, to say the least. I can't recommend this book enough.

-Ski

This is a very nice version of this wonderful title for folks who are into the aircraft of The Third Reich.
I owned a copy of the original back when it first came out, as I was into building scale models of this genre aircraft in my youth. Somewhere along the way during the last 40 years, I parted company with my original copy. This version is in a smaller format than the original, but in my opinion, nothing that has suffered. Maybe the original edition should have been in this size format! Some have complained that some of the photographs are not very good. In my opinion, they are the same in this edition as in the original. I always thought that the photos were not very high quality, but since most of them were taken from 1930-1945, quite often under less than ideal circumstances, I have always thought "For God's sake, we're extremely lucky to have ANY photos of some of these aircraft!". Maybe someone could Photoshop them a bit and improve them for a future edition? Also, the color plates by William Green that come in this edition are a great extra that was not present in the original, as I recall. These were scarce, and highly sought after, back in the 1970's by scale modelers.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants an authoritative reference on German WWII military aircraft, as it is probably the best volume available on the aircraft of this time in history.

this is a book that covers diagrams,shows you load outs on german aircraft, gives a lot of great detail of what else was on there planes and as well covers development of how the aircraft came to be.

unfortunately for there specifications it only has a small amount of info for major series i was hoping for the amount of variants that they have listed in this book that they would have specifications for each one but still it is a decent book.

*update 9-22-10*

ok after now reading it over and over a few times this book i feel is going to be a hard book to beat on the market today sure you can have a few books to match up to it and then pass it by,

but this book has tons of info to it and it is good for listing maybe to much variants but i have a saying and that is * there is no such thing as to much info on anything more info i feel is always a better thing*