Arming the Luftwaffe: The German Aviation Industry in World War II Illustrated Edition

Outstanding! One of the best books I have read on the subject of the development of the Luftwaffe technological and industrial base and its demise. There is also much discussion on the gradual replacement of skilled German workers with unskilled (and obviously unmotivated) foreign slave laborers. The book also includes analysis of issues such as aircraft engine development in Germany at the time and aircraft design development regarding the jet aircraft. There is very limited discussion on aerial battles and front-line operations, but there are plenty of other books that cover those subjects. Taken in conjunction with other books by authors such as Citino and Stahel (and others), one can appreciate conclusions that the German high command (i.e., Hitler, Goering, the OKL general staff, and the entire OKW) were essentially incompetent when it came to running a war.

How the German airforce was built and rebuilt through the war

I read this book to expand my knowledge of aero-engine technologies but it gave me much more. While the book is a good read without many slow sections I was impressed from the start with the power it possessed thanks to the depth of research that the author had undertaken. The early sections gave insights into the reactionary approach to fighting a total war that the Nazi regime displayed. The real sleeper in this book is its coverage of the use of what was basically slave labour and the move to dispersed and underground production. Two thirds into the book and Orwell's "1984" became less fiction and more prediction of what a global unending conflict might have looked like. This image was underlined by the balanced presentation devoid of excessive adjectives and alliteration.Congratulations on a brilliant piece of work.

I used this as a source for research for my book THE DECISIVE DUEL: SPITFIRE VS. 109, a "dual biography" of the British Supermarine Spitfire and the German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter aircraft of the Second World War. I found it accurate and thoroughly researched (2,000+ footnotes). As I was using many of the same sources myself, I was able to assess the quality of the underlying research as well as the author's conclusions.Those conclusions are particularly valuable because the book complements rather than duplicates the too-little work that has been done on this subject since the US Strategic Bombing Survey, done while the rubble was still smoldering. The closest comparison is with Lutz Budrass, Flugzeugindustrie und Luftrüstung in Deutschland, 1918-1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1998) but it is different in approach and emphasis (we still need an English translation of Budrass, please). But while Budrass focuses on the pre-war rise of the industry and offers a case study on the Ju 88, this book concentrates on the industry's wartime adaptation. His case study, of the design and production of the He 162, makes a good book-end with Budrass' on the Ju 88. Nor does the book aim to duplicate the type-by-type summaries of Ferenc A. Vajda and Peter Dancey, German Aircraft Industry and Production, 1933-1945 (Warrendale, PA: SAE International, 1998).This book is recommended for anyone with a serious interest in the Luftwaffe and German wartime aircraft. There remains a lot more of the story to be told. I hope someone else will write a book on this subject that uses the FD microfilm files held by the Imperial War Museum as well as this book has used their counterpart sources in Washington and Freiburg.

Interesting read for those of us who work in aerospace and are under pressure to deliver products faster and for less. The material is laid out in a logical order, pre-war and inter-war periods. I would have liked more pictures of the factories and planes, but there was enough.

Much more than another collection of "there I was, surrounded by hordes of American fighters" type book, Uziel actually adds quite a bit to the sum total of the armchair historians knowledge fund. Example: the ME 262, the delay of which is almost always ascribed to Hitler's demands (easy way out for all former Nazis-blame Hitler), really was a problem with engine production. And that is the strength of the book; rather than just blame this or that political decision, it takes a look at the whole (if you will) military/industrial complex. And with the Reich, the slavepower complex, too.