entemedor
Posts: 65
Joined: 6/14/2002 From: Barcelona (Spain) Status: offline
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TIMJOT, The team of authors Christopher Shores/Brian Cull have other Grub Street books witht he same level of detail than 'Bloody Shambles', they usually share their work with authors 'from the other side' to obtain as much objective a view as possible. I found all of them excellent, there should be no problem obtaining them from Amazon. They are: 'Malta: the Hurricane years' and 'Malta: the Spitfire year', co-authored with Nicola Malizia, two volumes covering the Italo-German offensive against Malta, 1940-42. 'Air war for Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete', also with Nicola Malizia. 'Fledgling Eagles: complete account of air operations during the Phoney War and Norwegian campaign, 1940', co-authored with John Foreman, Christian-Jacques Ehrengardt, Heinrich Weiss and Bjorn Olsen. As all three campaigns above involved also a good deal of naval operations, the books have much of interest concerning attacks on naval and merchant ships and the aircraft which carried them. One of the things which I remember noting specially in these books was the impact, out of all proportion, which a single German fighter Staffel (7./JG26) had when it started offensive patrols over Malta. They were the cause of most of the British losses over the island, but the most remarkable thing was that the vast majority of claims by 7./JG26 pilots could be matched to a British aircraft shot-down, force-landed or at least damaged. This piece of research benefited from circumstances quite unusual when studying an air campaign: there was just one German unit and a few British squadrons flying the concerned aircraft types, always over the same geographical area, and with complete records available for both sides. A researcher paradise! Even then, it is really unusual that 90% of the claims made by the 7./JG26 leading ace, Hauptmann Joachim Muncheberg, can be linked to a British plane actually hit. Cheers, Entemedor
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