Luftwaffe: Secret Wings of the Third Reich

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steelpillow said:
Oh, and your next project? My personal vote goes to "German tailless and flying wing development 1919-1945", but I'm guessing that my second choice, Secret Missiles of the Third Reich, is the more likely?

It is not.

This is the third in my Luftwaffe series.

Luftwaffe: Secret Wings of the Third Reich
by Dan Sharp

£6.99 in the UK

Contents include the usual suspects, and some unusual ones too:
Various Messerschmitt designs - the P 01 (including a previously unknown drawing of the first P 01-116 from early 1939, and I have explained why Lippisch started with '116'), P 03, P 04, P 05, P 06 (including previously unknown drawings), P 08 (including a previously unknown drawing of it with two massive cannon mounted in the nose), P 010, several P 10s (including previously unpublished sketches), P 11, low aspect ratio interceptor Super 163 (previously unknown), Me 163 A, B and C (previously unknown ugly original version), both Me 263s, Me 329 Stuka version (previously unknown) etc.
Various Lippisch designs - Delta VI (including mock-up photos), P 13a, P 13b (including previously unpublished Lippisch sketches) etc.
Various Horten designs - I, II, III, IV, V, VII, VIII, IX (including previously unpublished drawings) etc.
Various Blohm & Voss designs - Nurflügel Jager (aka Ae 607 - with the original contemporary drawing, published here for the first time), Göttinger (previously unknown - like the P 208 but with a tractor prop), P 208, P 209, P 212 (the P 212.01 is previously unknown - what's shown elsewhere as the P 212.01 isn't actually the P 212.01!), both P 215s (the first version was smaller with no turret), some other previously unknown designs etc.
Various Gotha designs - P-60A, P-60B and both P-60Cs.
Various Junkers designs - both EF 128s (the first version is previously unknown), the Ju 248 etc.
Various Arado designs - the 1930s flying wing (previously unknown), seven of the nine twin-jet night fighters (five of them previously unknown), the E 581, more on the E 555.
Some Heinkel designs (including, I think, previously unpublished drawings), some Focke-Wulf designs (see below).
And some other designs too...

It's gone to press and should be out within a couple of weeks.

NB: Based on my research for this title, it turns out that what's previously been established as fact about the progression of German flying wings and tailless aircraft is not entirely accurate. Lippisch didn't leave the DFS because of the Me 163, and he didn't leave Messerschmitt because of the Me 163. Focke-Wulf designed a giant flying wing transport in 1942, Wolfram Horten didn't die as a result of enemy action and the final production version of the Go 229/Ho 229/Ho 267 was going to be a two-seater.
And I found the original Focke-Wulf 1000 x 1000 x 1000 report. The so-called 'C' was actually drawn up months before the other two. I believe the reason that someone called it the 'C' was because the file is in reverse order - with the first page right at the back. The sketch showing the 'C' was made towards the beginning of the project. If you opened the file and rifled through it looking for drawings, without bothering to read the intervening pages, you would come across the later two first (and you might called them 'A' and 'B' even though Focke-Wulf didn't call them that), then find the earliest drawing right at the end and decide it must be later.
It's no wonder the only known drawings of it are re-draws - the original is horrible. You'll see what I mean.
 

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Interesting that the victim on the cover photo is a German airplane (albeit with French insignia).

Mortons Media continues to issue the best bookazines, and this Luftwaffe series is the best of those! (Unfortunately, unlike the Key bookazines, these are hard to find in the U.S.)
 
gatoraptor said:
Interesting that the victim on the cover photo is a German airplane (albeit with French insignia).

Mortons Media continues to issue the best bookazines, and this Luftwaffe series is the best of those! (Unfortunately, unlike the Key bookazines, these are hard to find in the U.S.)

Thanks. The victim in Ronnie's cover art is a French-made Ju 88, the AAB-1.
 
gatoraptor said:
(Unfortunately, unlike the Key bookazines, these are hard to find in the U.S.)

One can order online: https://www.classicmagazines.co.uk/product/view/productCode/5529
 
I'm not a fan of digital publications. I'm a traditionalist and still prefer real books and magazines. (Heck, I still use a flip phone!)

And I'm aware of several places online where I can order copies from the U.K., but it's a lot cheaper to walk into an American bookstore and buy one here. All of Key Publishing's specials are readily available here, so why can't Mortons'?
 
gatoraptor said:
I'm not a fan of digital publications. I'm a traditionalist and still prefer real books and magazines. (Heck, I still use a flip phone!)

And I'm aware of several places online where I can order copies from the U.K., but it's a lot cheaper to walk into an American bookstore and buy one here. All of Key Publishing's specials are readily available here, so why can't Mortons'?

As mentioned previously concerning my other Luftwaffe titles, I have no oversight of distribution. However, I believe we do offer our bookazines to the same buyers as Key but it's down to the stores themselves to decide what they want to sell. As to why some stores aren't interested in selling Mortons bookazines, I have no idea.
 
ov-101 said:
I hope one day your bookazines will merge into one large book.

In terms of content, each of the three volumes I've produced has nearly the same number of words and images as my British Secret Projects book - and that's a fairly hefty volume. So if they were compiled into one large book it would have more than 900 images and nearly 280,000 words. That's quite a book! By way of comparison, I believe an Osprey book is around 20,000 words on average.
 
I look forward to seeing these:

Blohm & Voss Nurflügel Jager (aka Ae.607), P.212.01, first version of P.215
First version of Junkers EF.128
Arado 5 previously unknown fighters
 
Zizi6785 said:
I look forward to seeing these:

Blohm & Voss Nurflügel Jager (aka Ae.607), P.212.01, first version of P.215
First version of Junkers EF.128
Arado 5 previously unknown fighters

My personal favourite of everything, if I'm allowed to choose, is the low aspect ratio delta-winged Super 163. You can see a little profile of it in the top left corner of the cover, based on the original drawings. I could hardly believe it when I stumbled across it.
 
Great to see it's online! Looks great and I can't wait to receive my copy! B)

Attached is an undisturbed view of the cover art. As I found out during modelling of the 3D model of the Bv P 215.02, Blohm & Voss were making all sorts of variants (particularly the wings), bundled an inconsistent bunch of drawings and calculations together and basically seems to have dumped the design(s) in RLM's lap in a very premature stage. The 3-view doesn't line up with the cutaway, which has an impossible windshield design. The sections are quite different from the cutaway... it's a mess (even the quoted basic dimensions have typos) and it was a big puzzle for me to make sense of it all. RLM went ahead with it anyway and since it was never built the most important thing is that it looks mighty cool! ;D

Good job Dan and thanks for having me do the cover again!
 

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Good drawing Ronnie!

From WOWP:
 

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As with my previous bookazines, this one is based on a lot of original documents. Here's an interesting one I thought you might like to see - the Volksjäger requirement telegram sent to Focke-Wulf on September 10, 1944. I could be wrong but I don't think it's been published anywhere else before.
 

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The original undoctored Messerschmitt P 08 brochure 3-view, complete with turrets and option for greater wingspan.
 

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Very good find! I was waiting for this (the Me 08) that long. Is this aircraft part of the bookazine?
 
athpilot said:
Very good find! I was waiting for this (the Me 08) that long. Is this aircraft part of the bookazine?

Yes. See my long rambling post at the beginning of this thread for a better idea of what else is in the bookazine. Regarding the P 08, its origin and purpose become much clearer when it is set in context. In short, it was Abteilung L's attempt to meet the same specification as what became the Me 264. Wurster's version of the P 04 was designed as a sub-scale test aircraft for it (that's what his brochure for it says!).
 
Okay, definitely going on my "Buy" list, likely ordered directly from the publisher rather than chance on Barnes & Noble carrying it here. It will definitely be shelved with my copies of the first two.
 
If I had a tail, it would be wagging right now. Seeing as I live in west Texas though, I'll start keeping an eye out around November or December.

Dan, I loved your first to volumes. And I look forward to this one.
 
Yay! There is was today on the shelves of my local WH Smith's! Dan, you are my hero! B) B) B)
 
steelpillow said:
Yay! There is was today on the shelves of my local WH Smith's! Dan, you are my hero! B) B) B)

Without your suggestion I would never have written it. You can't really write something like that without Lippisch and the Hortens and I was never a particular fan of theirs - they always seemed rather objectionable and arrogant, while having achieved relatively little in the grand scheme of things. But when you proposed that I write about flying wing and tailless designs, I realised it would be a good opportunity to challenge my own preconceived ideas. It took a long time to piece everything together but in the end, although I don't find those three individuals any more appealing, I think I understand them and their circumstances a little better.
 
At last a good reason to go into WH Smiths!
 
Nice to know that I have had some influence to the good in this world at last. ;)

The Hortens were a bit like Bucky Fuller, brilliant outsiders who were too full of themselves to realise they were mostly reinventing what others knew already.

Lippisch did deserve his high reputation and earned his status. His single-minded vision drove the basic long-term research, which led to high-speed tailless and all-wing aircraft, right through the 1920s and 1930s. Even his earliest tailed gliders were methodically laying the foundations for his tailless programme. Without him Germany would have been no better off than Britain and America, fiddling with a few dodgy prototypes and dreaming hopelessly of a decent budget.

Can you imagine driving a fringe idea through the heart of the Nazi military establishment without a massive dose of arrogance to sustain you? But Lippisch was human enough to befriend Britain's GTR Hill (of Pterodactyl fame), and the two would take their wives along when they went to visit each other. So he can't have been all that inhuman.

Update: Having posted the above last night before turning to your discussions of them, I find that you already know far more about them than I do. ::)
 
Typical that every time I publish the 'Unknown!' section in one of my Luftwaffe: Secret bookazines, I end up more or less immediately coming up with something that overturns what I've just written. This time around I wrote (p131, under 'Lippisch/Messerschmitt'):
"The reference to the Ju 248 having a turbojet is strange, since it was actually powered by two rocket engines, yet no original drawing of the P 15 has yet been unearthed so exactly how this unlikely marriage of components would have worked remains unclear".
I had one original copy of Lippisch's P 15 'Diana' notes but without drawings before I put out the bookazine. Then I followed up a second reference and found similar notes accompanied by eight pages of sketches showing some of the wildest Lippisch designs you've never seen - around 11 different configurations. One looks a bit like a turbojet powered P 13 with Me 163 wings. I don't want to just post them all up, since I'll no doubt publish them in due course, but you can see a little of the first sheet of sketches below.
 

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A mistake?
In an aviation book?
Shurely shome mishtake?

welcome to the club.

Chris
 
CJGibson said:
A mistake?
In an aviation book?
Shurely shome mishtake?

welcome to the club.

Chris

Heh heh! It was accurate when I wrote it - no original drawing had been unearthed at that point, or so I thought. I vaguely recall seeing, in one of the German Secret Projects books, a Lippisch sketch showing a delta fighter with an intake which looked rather like a snarling mouth. Unicraft even put a model out based on it as the 'P.15 Ent.1'. It would seem that this, rather than the He 162/Ju 248/Me 163 wing-root intake mashup designs commonly bandied about, is what Lippisch actually intended for the P 15 Diana. Well, that's one of the designs, anyway. Some of them have prone pilot positions, with a centrally mounted dorsal turbojet with a big fin mounted on top of that like a gigantic shark's fin...
 
The first one appears in Luftwaffe Secret Projects: Fighters by Walter Schick, shown here in its original context. The others are from among the numerous other designs shown in the same document...
 

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In the U.S., or at least in the Atlanta area, availability of Mortons publications seems to have gone from bad to worse. I had to order the last one directly from the U.K. and I fear having to do the same for this one. The rival publications from Key all seem to be readily available here.
 
gatoraptor said:
In the U.S., or at least in the Atlanta area, availability of Mortons publications seems to have gone from bad to worse. I had to order the last one directly from the U.K. and I fear having to do the same for this one. The rival publications from Key all seem to be readily available here.

I'm told that we have a distribution arrangement with Barnes & Noble. They should be able to stock Mortons bookazine titles should they choose to do so. But if they don't choose to stock them, I don't suppose there's much Mortons can do about it.
 
Finally I got my copy!!!! It`s another "must have" from Dan`s workshop, packed with brilliant airplane designs. Although Dan`s preference goes to the Messerschmitt Super 163, I got thrilled by the sheer suggestion of the massive Focke-Wulf flying wing, propelled by six Deutz Dz 720, each with 5000Hp. Also of my choice, a table with different aircraft layouts, revealing many unknown configurations considered by Heinkel. Finally, Gustav Staatz`s barrel engine. was he related to the Statax company, also involved in "trommel" engines?
 
I'm not especially interested in the topic, but Dan and Morton's have done such a great job on it I really must buy a copy.
 
Wurger said:
Finally I got my copy!!!! It`s another "must have" from Dan`s workshop, packed with brilliant airplane designs. Although Dan`s preference goes to the Messerschmitt Super 163, I got thrilled by the sheer suggestion of the massive Focke-Wulf flying wing, propelled by six Deutz Dz 720, each with 5000Hp. Also of my choice, a table with different aircraft layouts, revealing many unknown configurations considered by Heinkel. Finally, Gustav Staatz`s barrel engine. was he related to the Statax company, also involved in "trommel" engines?

PaulMM (Overscan) said:
I'm not especially interested in the topic, but Dan and Morton's have done such a great job on it I really must buy a copy.

Thanks for the kind words. When I set out to write Luftwaffe: Secret wings I was quaking in my boots because I thought there was unlikely to be anything to discover about the development of flying wing and tailless aircraft in Germany up to the end of the Second World War that hadn't already been exhaustively written about. Who would have thought there was so much still to find out, not to mention all the bitter rivalry, jealousy and betrayal that went on behind the scenes.
 
Even the earliest days are filled with little cameos. For example much effort was put in before WWI, to try and lure Dunne to the Lohner company. I am not sure whether this was because people recognised him to be so far ahead of Etrich or because they were his rivals. In the end, Lohner's "Pfeilflieger" simply violated his German patents which he had lodged, though they chose not to remove the tail. After the war, while Wenk was building his Weltensegler tailless glider (and Lippisch was developing his structural principles on a tailed one), GTR Hill developed the theory of the inherently stable aerofoil for his work on the Pterodactyls and a German theorist, whose name I forget, came over and took it back to Germany, where he and a colleague took it another step further and Lippisch took it on board. Lippisch acknowledges their work; he and Hill became good friends, taking their wives along when they visited each other, right up to the eve of war. But why when Dunne was so universally celebrated in Germany, far more so than in his homeland, did Lippisch never seem to mention the widely-acknowledged "father of the tailless aeroplane"? Did Lippisch's arch-rivals the Hortens know about him, for they don't seem to have mentioned him either? There are stories to be unearthed and retold all right.

But I doubt that a prequel would catch the same news-stand interest (even if it were to burrow down the leading-edge slat/slot rabbit hole ??? ). What's to be next, then?
 
I've just confirmed from Amazon (USA) that this title is out of print. I'd been waiting for Barnes & Noble to stock it as B&N did Mr. Sharp's two preceding volumes on the Luftwaffe -- but I waited too long. Could anyone suggest a way to acquire Secret Wingsnow that it is OOP? I would be ordering from the USA . . .
Thank you!
 
twarren57 said:
I've just confirmed from Amazon (USA) that this title is out of print. I'd been waiting for Barnes & Noble to stock it as B&N did Mr. Sharp's two preceding volumes on the Luftwaffe -- but I waited too long. Could anyone suggest a way to acquire Secret Wingsnow that it is OOP? I would be ordering from the USA . . .
Thank you!
If you have a PayPal account and the supplier accepts overseas orders than you can just order from a UK supplier, pay PayPal in USD and they will pay the supplier in UKP, no hassle.
Otherwise, if all else fails then someone like me can always buy one in our local newsagent and post it to you.
 
steelpillow said:
Even the earliest days are filled with little cameos. For example much effort was put in before WWI, to try and lure Dunne to the Lohner company. I am not sure whether this was because people recognised him to be so far ahead of Etrich or because they were his rivals. In the end, Lohner's "Pfeilflieger" simply violated his German patents which he had lodged, though they chose not to remove the tail. After the war, while Wenk was building his Weltensegler tailless glider (and Lippisch was developing his structural principles on a tailed one), GTR Hill developed the theory of the inherently stable aerofoil for his work on the Pterodactyls and a German theorist, whose name I forget, came over and took it back to Germany, where he and a colleague took it another step further and Lippisch took it on board. Lippisch acknowledges their work; he and Hill became good friends, taking their wives along when they visited each other, right up to the eve of war. But why when Dunne was so universally celebrated in Germany, far more so than in his homeland, did Lippisch never seem to mention the widely-acknowledged "father of the tailless aeroplane"? Did Lippisch's arch-rivals the Hortens know about him, for they don't seem to have mentioned him either? There are stories to be unearthed and retold all right.

But I doubt that a prequel would catch the same news-stand interest (even if it were to burrow down the leading-edge slat/slot rabbit hole ??? ). What's to be next, then?

Lippisch does seem to have given Dunne credit. See the attached pages from his presentation to the DAL - a highly select organisation which counted only the most highly accomplished, high ranking, or highly regarded German aviation industry personnel among its members. You'll see Etrich in there too. It's on p38-39 of Luftwaffe: Secret Wings. After his phonecall to Lippisch on the Wasserkuppe, and Lippisch's response (p20-21), I believe Reimar Horten had his sights set on Lippisch exclusively, and Walter really only played second fiddle to Reimar. I don't think the Hortens had any particular appreciation for anyone else's achievements.
What's next is more bookazines...
 

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Thank you for straightening me out, Dan. Serves me right for jumping straight from the Wasserkuppe to the Bats from Hamburg and then flitting about. I must read it through properly.
 

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