Hello All
As posted elsewhere I've recently purchased various books published in France, no doubt capitalising in part on the 1914 anniversary commemorations. I wanted to make some comments on them. All are naturally enough in French but the translation of the title in each case seems relatively obvious. I have since added one more. So, here is the first,
Les AVIONS CÉLÈBRES de la Première Guerre mondiale 
IMG_4792 by
nigeljjackson, on Flickr
Coming from the highly respected Histoire & Collections publishing house, my eyes lit up when I first caught sight of this book and its striking cover. In landscape format, it features over sixty 3D colour representations of twenty-eight famous aircraft of the war shown against some stunning photographic air, earth and sea backgrounds. Each of the aircraft types, if not actually the specific ones shown in the representations has at least one accompanying photo.
Having flicked through the book, there is little doubt that some of the images are really nice. Yet on closer examination, I soon realised that some work better than others and before too long I discovered a few howlers so fundamental that they should have no part in a book of this significance. The two most obvious examples relate to the Sopwith Camel and the Fokker DVII. In themselves, to the untutored eye, the images are very attractive, but would you have flown a Sopwith Camel, as portrayed in two of three images where the rear pair of cabane struts have simply been missed off? How on earth has this mistake been made, not least when adjacent photographs of Camels make these very clear. In one of the offending images the pilot is in a shallow dive. Good luck to him!
There are also three representations of Fokker DVIIs. Two of them show the interplane struts. Think about the moulding limitations of an old plastic 1/72 model and the unrealistic thickness you might expect with the struts. Now scale them up. What we are shown are struts the size of logs. They look absurd and and totally contradict the photos included which show their extraordinarily slender nature. Again, how can the artist and the editor not have noticed this?
I haven't been through all the images to check for similar fundamental errors; perhaps there are none. Yet the artist does seem to have failed to note the double wiring on British aircraft, the lozenge work on some types does not seem well-captured and to my untrained eye the 90 degree square cut tips to the ailerons on Fokker Dr.I images [devoid of any slight rounding of the corners], seem wrong. I was also unsure about the scale accuracy of the crew in relation to the cockpit in some cases. This seemed most evident in the tiny people flying a Breguet XIV.
So many aspects of this book make it a lovely one to flick through but the errors noted are deflating. Let's also commend the book for a breadth of coverage in one sense since it includes seaplanes and strategic bombers and recognise that any selection of twenty-eight aircraft is inevitably subjective. Just don't go looking here for an SE5a or a Bristol F2b Fighter, an RE.8 or a DH4, a Pfalz or a Halberstadt. Finally, we may be amused, but the publishers might be mortified to see that on the contents page many people's favourite triplane is listed as a Kokker Dr.I (sic).
Best wishes
Nigel
