I've got hold of a copy of the book. I didn't really want to read it - the publisher's dreadful 'hype' was rather off-putting, almost 'belittling' of all the authors that have gone before (in the words of one Battle of Britain expert..) and I instinctively knew that I wasn't going to like it. But I'm enjoying it - sort of. She can write. As some have pointed out, the author - Victoria Taylor - is a 'professional' historian so be warned, this is not just another re-telling of the Battle of Britain. But then nor is it what it claims to be. The first 90 pages or so cover the Westfeldzug (campaign in the West) while by page 260 the author has already moved on to cover the night 'Blitz' while chapter 15 'Dante's Inferno' takes us into 1941, R.V. Jones and X-Verfahren territory. A fairly well-trodden path. This, according to the author, is the Battle of Britain petering out on the German side, with the propaganda emphasis increasingly focusing on the forthcoming war against Bolshevism as a means of distracting attention from the failure of the Luftwaffe over England!
The publisher has made all sorts of claims for this work - revelatory, deeply researched, the Luftwaffe 'with the varnish stripped away'.. You can probably guess what's coming.
The book according to its author is not about the 'cartoonish' Luftwaffe that we are apparently all familiar with, presumably from the movie 'The Battle of Britain' - which Taylor actually spends a couple of pages psycho-analysing. Briefly put, it would appear that nowadays we all think of the men of the Luftwaffe as being mostly 'honourable opponents' and 'worthy foes' - who suffered and died as did our own brave RAF heroes. This is largely the influence of people like Galland and movies like 'The Battle of Britain'.
The reality - according to Taylor - is that in some instances the men of the Luftwaffe were hard-bitten Nazis, some of whom relished anti-semitic violence; '..the chivalrous fighter pilots did not cancel out the small pool of ruthless killers who already lurked in all branches of the Luftwaffe by the summer of 1940..'
Some Luftwaffe men such as Lehweß-Litzmann - former Kommodore of KG 3 who went over to the Soviets and held key positions in the post-war East German (DDR) state airline Interflug - flew his first sorties over England during late 1940 and had already been disgusted at the treatment meted out to Jews and civilians and not just in Poland. The author goes so far as to state that '[..] the German 'knights of the air' should not be detached from the crimes that the regime committed..' The problem here of course is that the Battle of Britain was not the 'ideological' war that characterised the fighting in the East, although according to Taylor it very much was....in fact page 325 is an account of a Luftwaffe pilot roped into a bit of mass-killing - pre-Battle of Britain. Perhaps shocking to the general reader, although apparently not a new account by any means. The 'problem' here of course is that this has little to do with the Battle of Britain as such..although the author strives hard to show us that it does.
So what is Victoria Taylor's goal in compiling this book in the way that she has? Apparently to 'remind' us that the Luftwaffe crews were not brave 'ordinary men' - the myth of 'just like us' - but ideologically driven and intent on furthering a tyrannical dictator's ambitions of conquest. The lengthy chapters covering the fighting in Poland, Noway and France don't so much set the stage for the Battle of Britain as ram home what 'nasty' people the German Wehrmacht actually were.
Unfortunately for the reader looking for a 're-telling' of the Battle of Britain from the German side - which is after all what the title is selling - the author's attempts to drive home this point leads her to wander way 'off subject' in places; from medical experiments on political prisoners to the beginnings of mass murder etc etc. Taylor's book is not an 'unbiased' account of the Battle of Britain as per the title - according to Taylor the German term 'Luftschlacht um England' (lit. 'air assault against England') covers the period after France and all the way to Barbarossa. Just for good measure she includes an account from a Luftwaffe bombing raid that took place in 1944! By now the reader is starting to wonder whether the author ever managed to point out the 'distinction' to the publisher because the blurb - indeed the jacket text - quite clearly states 'Battle of Britain'. But Taylor's account only partly focuses on key engagements during the period July-September 1940 and there is, for example, no assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the combatants for the period in question. As Ben Dunnell pointed out in his (largely complimentary) review, this is not a 'who shot down who' book - it certainly does not focus on the 'hyper-minutiae' of the battle as the author rather disparagingly puts it. But some of this 'focus' might well have seen the author avoid some of the factual errors that crop up in her account. There are lengthy digressions that take in the 'views' of the German media - heavily controlled by the Propaganda Ministry so I'm struggling to understand the value of these - and personal accounts from the home front that have little or no connection to the Battle of Britain. Thinking about the author's 'goal' in writing the book the way she did, it is evident she gives no-one on the German side the chance to present their mostly well-known (post-war) accounts or even lets those directly involved speak (for the most part) preferring period diaries and letters from interested 'bystanders'..
Victoria Taylor is a 'new' young 'professional' historian, too young to have interviewed any veterans on the German side. Some 'amateurs' have been researching and writing about the Luftwaffe and interviewing veterans for many years. Taylor - and her publisher - seem wholly unaware of some areas of research and of some of the experienced authors out there in the Luftwaffe enthusiast fraternity. How can you write a book about the Battle of Britain without referencing Erik Mombeek's history of Jagdgeschwader 2? Or quoting from Jules Meimberg's memoir? And while a few of her passages are based on Bungay and Goss, there are far more footnotes referencing those well-known Battle of Britain 'specialists' Dildy and Crickmore. None acknowledging the work of John Vasco for example. As a result her book is far too 'lop-sided'. But then I guess you can ignore the 'historiography' of the battle if you want to focus on medical experiments carried out on Jews and prisoners for the benefit of German airmen - post-Battle of Britain! (p332-333). And 'depart' from the 'myth' of the clean Luftwaffe. The author claims at one point to have 're-written' the Luftwaffe back into the Battle of Britain, which is ludicrous. At best, 70% of this book pertains to the title, the rest is discourse to prove the point being rather clumsily made. And, as another commentator has suggested, regardless of Taylor's credentials, her book could well have been more accurately entitled 'A random essay about the early years of WWII, including brief mentions of the Battle of Britain'. In fact while the publisher would never have gone for it, many of the criticisms about Taylor's work - and there have been plenty as a quick read through some of the reviews on Amazon reveal - might easily have been deflected with this more 'accurate' title.
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