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Book Review of German Secret Weapons Blueprint For Mars

German Secret Weapons Blueprint For Mars
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Ford's book was first printed in Oct 1969. It covers a broad selection of Nazi Germany's advanced weapons (rockets, aircraft, submarines, artillery, chemical and other munitions). However, given the print date, I have found no mention of the Enigma cipher machine and Britain's success in decrypting Enigma messages. It was not until the 1970s that Britain declassified some aspects of the intelligence warfare conducted so successfully by the Bletchley Park team using the Colossus computer. For a discussion of Enigma, Colossus, and Bletchley Park, the reader may find R. V. Jones's "The Wizard War" (printed in 1978) to be of interest.

One theme that comes through in this book is that Germany often produced brilliant, ground-breaking prototype weapons (or made a handful of them in factories), but muddled the deployment of them. Granted, the V-1 and V-2 weapons fired at Britain were numerous and did grievous damage. However, to take one example out of several, if the ME-262 jet plane had been produced earlier in the war, and fitted out exclusively as a fighter plane, the war would have been prolonged at least.

Like all the books in this series ("Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War II"), there are numerous B/W illustrations, mostly photos, probably 60% of the 160 pages. The text is concise and readable, and will encourage the reader to delve deeper in other, more recent books. Eleven of Brian Ford's other books on weapons of this period are cited at the end.

For other works on the WWII Luftwaffe, readers may want to read authors such as Walter Boyne, Alfred Price, or Albert Speer.