Quote:
Originally Posted by winny
The problem I found with Bungay's book was that I was very aware of him whilst reading it, if you get what I mean.
It felt a bit like a vehicle for Bungay more than a book on the BoB..
I prefer James Holland's, it's the most balanced BoB book I've read.
I do find that when Bungay's on TV I don't particularlly like him. He likes himself a lot though...
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I very much agree with that. The book is not badly written, although his conclusions are sometimes simply go against logic and the sources. In particular his most popular claim that the LW was loosing in the attrition war was based on his misunderstanding of an old force curve found ie. in Wood and Dempster about the LW frontline strenght in Western Europe, showing a steady decline towards the winter, esp. bombers. Bungay ingeniously concluded they were running out of aircraft - something quite different than how many aircraft they deployed in France - a notion very easy to check against the actual total LW strenght returns of bombers, for example via Murray's old Strategy for Defeat book, which show they had a steady around 1400 bombers during the whole battle, +/- 20, even increasing somewhat towards the end. Such lazyness in research and the hunger for sensation against careful research..
However what disturbes me the most is that he and the media has sort of made a gloria above his head about all this "fresh look" nonsense, when in effect his book has absolutely nothing new about it. He merely repeat the same stuff the British historian/researcher pioneers dug up and wrote in the 1950/1960s. Then he wrote his own conclusions, which are 95% the same as previous authors. Fresh look my ass.. the guy is not even a historian, never studied as one, never researched as one, he studied various nonsense than worked in the commercial field all his life. All he did was compile the previous works of others and add his own thoughts about it, some of which are good, and well thought out indeed, some of them just pure journalist nonsense, and then this guy gets shown on documentaries as some kind of 'leading expert' of the case. He wrote a readable best seller, based on the works of others.