World War II Database

Over 7,000 twin-engine He 111 Doppel-Blitz aircraft were built during the design's production life, and they were very much workhorses of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe. John Weal's He 111 Kampfgeschwader on the Russian Front detailed the operational history of He 111 aircraft during the 1941-1945 Russo-German War, narrating their early history as tactical and strategic bombers and their slow evolution into jacks-of-all-trades that ultimately witnessed the end of German pockets such as Stalingrad and Breslau (now Wroclaw) as they delivered bread and ammunition. Trivia such as the Jun 1944 mission that destroyed 44 US B-17 bombers on the ground at Poltava, Ukraine illustrates the level of detail the author dove into in this thin 96-page volume. Quotations from the memoirs of He 111 airmen gave a personal touch to the otherwise very technical and at-times monotonous text. Weal doubled as an illustrator for the title as well, and his color plates of 30 He 111 aircraft of various units across 10 pages would certainly excite modelers and those into the unit history niche. I would recommend this He 111 Kampfgeschwader on the Russian Front to German aircraft enthusiasts as it lived up to the reputation of its fellow books of the "Osprey Combat Aircraft" series.