Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Fighters 1939-1945

Rating:
Summary: They were doing this when?
Review: At the beginning of World War II the world had pretty well settled on what fighter aircraft would look like: an engine up front (usually a V-12), a low wing, a single pilot, machine guns firing through the propeller and/or mounted in the wings. To be sure there were some that didn't look like that, the Navy wanted radial engines, the P-38's twin boom construction, the P-39 with its engine behind the pilot, but most, from all air forces met the standard.

But as time went on, the tecnologies began to change. Where do you put the radar, and the changes in airframes to suit the jet engine where you had big air intakes and exhausts caused a tremendous amount of thinking about where things go.

At the forefront of this thinking was the Germans. They were basically ahead of the rest of the world. They had rocket and jet engines much further into development and production than the rest. Each of the airframe manufacturers in Germany produced a number of prospective designs to present to the Government. Strangely enough, many of these designs have a very close resemblence to aircraft produced later by the Soviets, British or Americans. Once in a while the author shows photographs of the later planes with the sketches or drawings the Germans were doing.

Obviously most of these aircraft were never built. You think about, sketch, discuss, and design very carefully before you commit the money to bending sheet metal. It makes you wonder where the authors found all this information.

Rating:
Summary: Great work
Review: I found this book, and it's two companions, to be very informative, keenly illustrated, loaded with rare photos, and easy to read. It makes a great coffee table book, and I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the WWII Luftwaffe and what might have been... Super job Mr's Schick and Meyer!

Rating:
Summary: Great work
Review: I found this book, and it's two companions, to be very informative, keenly illustrated, loaded with rare photos, and easy to read. It makes a great coffee table book, and I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the WWII Luftwaffe and what might have been... Super job Mr's Schick and Meyer!

Rating:
Summary: Good, Not Great
Review: The research effort into the a/c themselves was extensive, careful, and critical, producing descriptions of, & data on, the a/c themselves that is excellent. Information provided on the revolutionary powerplants and armaments, which made these a/c fighter weapons, is much less detailed; nonexistent in the case of the weapons. By far, the book's greatest flaw is the amatuerish artwork. The colour drawings are on every page, and so poorly done that they detract from the book on every level. The "art" is awful. The cover painting is great, but that's it. Even the line drawings are amatuerish; art exhibits poor execution of perspective, and childlike "pilots" that are embarassing, while the line art is just sloppy. Were it not for the abysmal art, the book would get 4 stars from me. As it is, not worth the money unless you have a use for the technical info, and even then, it costs too much; had the art been better, it would have been worth the price.

Rating:
Summary: Got art?
Review: The strength of any book that seeks to recreate the projected German aircraft of World War II is the quality of its artwork. When well done, either photographed from models or digitally drawn in three dimensions, these planes evoke a sense of what might have been developed had the war continued. Although "Luftwaffe Secret Projects" does have serviceable three-view line drawings and brief descriptions of the aircraft, the illustrations for both volumes are disappointing, and either have a chameleon-like vividness or the silvery artificiality of what would be found on a lunchbox from the Fifties. A comparison with the art found at Luft '46 is a reminder that it can be done better.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting but left me wanting for more
Review: This is a great coffee table style book if you want to see what might have been if the war had continued on for another year. Although there aren't as many photos as I was hoping for, the photos that are there are unbelievable: you can see how advanced the German Luftwaffe's designs were and you can see similarities between their designs and aircraft that were produced by US, British, and Russian air forces for the decade after the war. The Messerschmidt P.1011 in particular looks so similar to a MiG-16 that you'd swear the photos were taken in 1952, not 1945. I'd still like to see less drawings and more photos, but it's still an interesting "read" for a coffee-table style book.