With this book, author Donald
Caldwell completes his unique, comprehensive history of JG 26,
the Luftwaffe unit most respected by the Western Allies. This
volume takes JG 26 from the beginning of 1943, when the American
8th Air Force first began to make its presence felt over occupied
Europe, until the end of the war. Although always outnumbered,
JG 26 had managed to dominate the airspace over northern France
in 1941 and 1942 by skillfully choosing the time and place for
its battles with the Royal Air Force. But in 1943 the destructive
potential of the American B-17s and B-24s took away that option;
they had to be attacked under any circumstances. The American
fighter escorts, which were bested easily by JG 26 in their
early encounters, grew rapidly in numbers and experience. Trapped
in a war of attrition that it could not win, the Luftwaffe,
and with it JG26, began an inexorable decline. The men of JG
26 fought on, scoring some spectacular, if isolated, successes
over Normandy, Arnhem, and the Ardennes. The unit's replacement
pilots were so poorly trained and badly outnumbered that most
were killed before their fifth mission, but the survivors continued
their struggle until the bitter end. The interviews with these
men, who describe their secrets of survival in the bluntest
of terms and struggle to explain why they continued to fight
for a lost, and evil, cause, are among the unique aspects of
the book.
The main body of the book is
a daily account of the wing's activities—similar in format
to a war diary, but one which takes full advantage of Allied
records and post-war research to give an accurate, well-balanced
presentation. As only two of the thirty volumes of the unit's
official diary survived the war, the creation of a daily combat
log was not simply a matter of transcribing records, but required
careful comparison of Allied documents, especially those derived
from radio intelligence, with the limited material available
from Germany. The book is based largely on primary documentation
obtained from the unit's veterans and on material from the national
archives of Germany and the UK and from the USAF Historical
Research Agency. The unit's veterans granted Don unprecedented
access to their personal documents and photo collections. The
book is thus new in every respect. In common with the author's
previous works, it is both an unbiased, scholarly history and
an interesting, highly readable book. It is fully illustrated
and annotated. It contains 200 photos of JG 26 personalities,
scenes, and aircraft; theater maps; mission maps; and a complete
bibliography. Lists of JG 26 casualties (with Allied victors)
and JG 26 aerial victories (with Allied victims) are included
in the text. Don is the first to publish compilations of this
scope. These tables will be of great value for enthusiasts and
historical researchers, and of great interest to Allied and
Luftwaffe veterans. The appendices contain lists of the unit's
bases and commanders from 1943-1945, lists of 1939-1945 air
victories for every JG 26 pilot, and an alphabetized list of
JG 26 pilot casualties for 1939-1945.
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