Brett Green

Most branches of the military have strict regulations on serving members not carrying and/or using cameras whilst on active service, in case those cameras fall into enemy hands and provide useful intelligence. Nonetheless, as the plethora of illustrated books and magazine articles on military subjects show, this regulation is more often honoured in the breach than the observance. But one sort of photograph never discouraged is that of the crashed or wrecked aircraft, often taken as a trophy photo by troops from the side of the victors. This book is composed mainly of that sort of picture, mostly from the years 1944 and 1945. Late war Luftwaffe colours are a continuing source of debate amongst modellers and enthusiasts, as German manufacturing collapsed, and aircraft were increasingly grounded for want of fuel or as Allied troops over-ran their bases. Yet despite this, the RLM (Reichsluftsministerium, or Reichs Air Ministry) maintained the illusion of organisation by issuing new orders over camouflage and colours during the last two years of the war.

This book uses rare colour photographs from the period - sometimes, it has to be admitted, their rarity value exceeds their usefulness as many pictures are blurred (sometimes through being extreme enlargements to show distant airframes) or are taken under such extreme lighting conditions as to make any interpretation of the colours on display an exercise in imagination. Nonetheless, there are interesting photographs to be found, especially of some of the late-war variants of Luftwaffe aircraft.

The book does start with a few photographs of crashed aircraft from earlier in the war; indeed, there is a page showing two crashed early-mark Bf.109s in Spain; then ten pages of images from the UK, and then another twelve pages of images from Italy, the Balkans, Germany and the Eastern Front before reaching the meat of the book with the last two years of the war. Finally, there is a section discussing the options and schemes for modelling the Me.262 jet fighter.

That section attracts the most criticism from me, as the photographs of (some admittedly very fine) models are quite low resolution digital images and display noticeable pixilation. This should have been so much better, even for a book published in 2006. Mostly, though, the wartime photographs are of such rarity as to make up for this minor quibble, though there is one pair of captions, of two photos of adjoining aircraft, which suggest two different things in each caption. Otherwise, a useful volume I shall refer to again.… (más)