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Old 04-13-2011, 06:08 PM
Kurfürst Kurfürst is offline
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This is a bit of an off topic, but personally, I do not have that much of an opinion of these new, more recent authors, especially Bungay. Bungay seems to me an extremely wishful neo-conservative author, and there are some glaring errors in his book.

The most notable is IIRC where he famously argues that losses sustained caused LW strenght was falling by some 30% - in fact he quotes the exact same statistical curve as Wood and Dempster some 30 years ago, except the W+D correctly labeled the table that it shows LW strenght in Western Europe - meaning that Bungay doesn't quite get the difference between redeployment and attrition, and strenght reports shown by ie. Murray disprove his so called analysis. The problem is, he has a set concept from the start, a 'revolutionary' one (which basically repeats the same as some authors 50 years ago), and he doesn't really lets the facts get in the way.

Richard Overy is, IMHO, a "serial author", much like Beavor. He's seemingly an expert of every aspect of history. He has read a thousend book, made no actual research himself, formed his opinion, which invariably causes some distortion as things get 'lost in translation' and wrote a 1001st. No thanks. I am interested in the historical facts, and rarely in an author's personal opinion of the facts. There are rare exceptions - for example Wilmott's summarial book on WW2, which I found reasonable, balanced and overall, excellent.

About Price I have mixed feelings. He is a very good writer, and an established air war historian, who is also reasonable, and tends to be as objective as possible; evidently he also makes his own primary research, unlike some others who seem to equally well versed in just about every historical field possible. OTOH, I often get the feeling that he tries to write best sellers, rather than book, deep history books, examplified by the horror that Runciman unleased upon the world under the disguise of a book about the Crusades. :p

Basically the British side of the Battle is very well covered, in depth, by British authors, but the contrast is striking when they start writing about the German side. Its obvious that they have little understanding, little or no research, and they repeat each other or some old clichés. And I have my doubts about the so-called recent research by generic historians - the British Goverment did a couple of studies and some data collection immidiately after the war, and basically all post-war authors repeat the same papers, and give varying, and often preconceptional conclusions based on that. They want to tell a given story, rather than write a good analytical history IMHO.

Personally I like Hooton for this reason, he seem to rely on a lot of German sources when writing on the German side of the Battle. The same goes to Foreman. But what I'd really like to see is a BoB book by Jochen or somebody of the caliber; rumor is at TOCH that one such of a horror depth book is in preperation, an ultimate bible, with every little detail possible... we have to wait and see.
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