I found this book provided a good over view of areial combat against Alied bombers during the last years of WWII. I had not been aware of the Sturmgruppen before seeing this title.

I found this book provided a good over view of areial combat against Alied bombers during the last years of WWII. I had not been aware of the Sturmgruppen before seeing this title.

During the spring and summer of 1944 the USAAF daylight strategic bomber offensive over Germany was at its height- and the German defenders were considering any number of desperate solutions in their attempts to stop the bombers. As the massed fleets of B-17 Fortresses and B-24 Liberators pulverised cities and industry throughout the Reich, the Luftwaffe hierarchy thought they had dreamt up an antidote. "Dare-devil young volunteer Luftwaffe fighter pilots were organised into elite bomber destroyer units, the Sturmgruppen" or `assault wings' - as described in an article I published in March 2001. ('Sturmgruppen 1944-Bomber Destroyers' -SAM, March 2001) The Sturmgruppen were to carry out stunning offensive actions in large Gefechtsverbaende or battle formations flying heavily armed and armored variants of the latest Focke Wulf 190 fighters. Their mass attacks were flown to within close-range to make certain of a `kill' and their 3 cm cannon were deadly - just a handful of shells was enough to start a fire in a B-17 or B-24. On a number of occasions the Fw 190s of the Sturmgruppen did great execution among the bomber formations - the thirty B-24s of the 445th BG shot down on 27 September 1944 representing something of a macabre record during the air war. Aerial battles in the ETO became `a slugging match between offence and defence' with the side with ` the most stamina winning by a knockout' according to the official US history. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the US 8th AF was saved by the development of the long-range fighter escort - the legendary P-51 Mustang powered by the Rolls Royce Merlin. Through the summer of 1944 the slow, unwieldy Fw 190s -laden with armor protection for their pilots - were no match for an omnipresent and massively numerically superior fighter escort. They were shot down in huge numbers in flames...which is precisely what any decent reviewer has to do to this....
This is another Osprey `potboiler' from John Weal. As usual it is a nice read. Yet while I have a certain amount of time for Weal's skills as a writer, the amount of research behind this volume appears limited. It constitutes an introduction to the subject- nothing more. Not surprising perhaps given that the Lorant/Goyat history of JG 300 published by Eagle Editions - appearing at the same time as Weal's volume - was some twenty years in the research and writing. Weal has done nothing but consult one or two dubious sources -Dahl, Hennig & Bethke - and his treatment is therefore rather cruelly lacking. There is little here in the way of first person accounts and the text repeats many of the old myths that have grown up around these units. There is reasonable photo content - but these are mostly copied from the Barbas `Aces' volumes or -worse - taken from Hennig and Bethke's JG 300 books. There are no new pictures and plenty of inaccurate captions and misidentifications. That is not Oskar Býsch sitting on the wing of his A-6 on P34 - but both Mombeek and Rodeike got that one wrong too.. There is no acknowledgement that the rare Sturmstaffel images are primarily from the collection of Barry Smith, the leading researcher into this unit- it would be interesting to learn how they came to appear in this book. As far as the text is concerned the treatment lives up to the poor impression of the whole; the mission summaries are cursory - and concentrate rather too much on losses with little information on victories or even the bomb group the Sturm units came up against. My main criticism is reserved for Weal's artwork, which in the age of computer-renderings is starting to look a little amateurish - and there are many errors - which all point to a lack of research. The numerals on all the aircraft of the wrong size and the spinner spirals inaccurate. The well-known `schwarze 8' of Willi Maximowitz (IV./JG 3 does not have a red/yellow spinner it is black/yellow. Blue 13 does not have the white fuselage band with black wavy line- that was `black 13'. Yellow 17 was not Willi Ungers mount. The JG 4 emblems are poorly drawn. Gefreiter Wagner's `Weiýe 11' did not have outboard Mk 108's; they were 2cm weapons, the white 11 is incorrect. Salffner's `white 6' is incorrect and the machine did not have outboard Mk 108's either but 2cm weapons. Walter Loos did not serve in IV. (Sturm)/JG 3 but flew the Bf 109G-6 with the Br 21cm rocket launchers in the old IV./JG 3.
In addition to poorly rendered artwork the text is inadequate beyond September 1944. The Sturmgruppen had virtually ceased to exist by November 1944, except for II.(Sturm)/JG 300. The story of how this unit - in concert with JG 301- lost ninety fighters over Berlin on 14 January 1945 is missing here and there is no information on JG 300's deployment along the Oder front during February 1945- the Russians closing in fast from the East ensured that combating 8th AF bomber formations was no longer a priority. The last sorties against the bombers were in fact flown on 2 March 1945 and the story of the Sturmgruppen ends there to all intents and purposes... The closing chapter `From Sturm to Ramm' is worthless - the Sonderkommando Elbe mission on 7 April 1945 had little or nothing to do with the Sturmgruppen - it was a sortie flown by light, unarmed Bf 109s and pilots of little or any combat experience on what was essentially a suicide mission...