Continuing with their superb books on Luftwaffe units and operations is this volume on anti-shipping units. This one begins with the in-fighting between the navy and air force over who should control these sorts of units with the Luftwaffe eventually wresting all the offensive units away from the navy. Of course, this presented a bit of a problem as the Luftwaffe had no experience in the area and though the squadrons themselves were fully formed, they were not well versed in torpedo tactics.

In fact, little thought was given to this aspect of warfare and few torpedoes (poor as they were) were even available. At one point units were forbidden to use them in attacking shipping because they were running low on them!

Most anti-shipping operations were carried out by conventional bombing and those few which were using torpedoes treated them as ordinary bombs, thus dropping them from too high an altitude and often destroying the torpedo in the drop. However, once ops got fully underway using modern aircraft such as the He-111, Ju-88 and FW-200, better results were obtained and by 1941 (the last year covered in this volume), there were a considerable number of successes.

In line with others in this series, there are a goodly number of aircrew stories, excellent photos and superb profiles, all of which are based on photographic references.

If you have enjoyed previous volumes in this series, then this is one that you really must have in your library.

April 2006

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