I certainly do recommend this book highly.
Although it would be absurd to compare this book with, say, a Tom Clancy novel, it also would be fair to say that the text largely fails to capture and reflect the human dimensions of these shattering conflicts. As a substantive work of scholarship it deserves much credit, but it is difficult to know exactly who the intended audience is. I doubt that the general reader of WW II history will read this detailed chronology from cover to cover. The text does not compel that kind of sustained attention.
I wonder if all the reviewers who have heaped accolades on this book actually have read it through. It often is easier to recognize virtue than to embrace it...
In it's favor, I cheerfully concede that the scholarship appears to be thorough and careful. The abbreviation lists, explanations of German operational units/commands, endnotes and bibliography are quite helpful. I assume that the technical accuracy is beyond reproach. Possibly it is the best and most accessible English-language chronology available to serious scholars of these actions.
The problem here seems to be that a meticulous and dispassionate chronology of military engagements, movements of units, and casualty lists, written after the fact by distilling details from primary sources, is not a full history. It is an essential part of the historical record, to be sure, but it is two-dimensional. The total experiences of the Luftwaffe on the Russian Front cannot be so neatly described because the conflict was not neat and tidy. War is a desperate enterprise: quirky, unpredictable, savage, gentle, brave, cowardly, wise, foolish, loving, hateful, and essentially incomprehensible. In short, it subsumes the full, rich tapestry of the human experience.
In Hawyard's book we have the melody, but by his choice the harmonies are missing. If one contrasts this text with Bruce Cattons' extraordinary series of Civil War studies, or with Evan Connell's brilliant and evocative biography of George Armstrong Custer in "Son of the Morning Star", one is struck by the difference between history as art and history as an actuarial record.
Reading Hayward's precise, accurate, and aseptic text seems, to me, like watching a skilled neurosurgeon perform a difficult operation: Technically impressive but emotionally absent. The men on both sides who struggled and died here largely have been overlooked, subordinated to the sanitary recounting of operational details. They deserve more.
As a different approach to the historiography of this conflict, one might wish to read "Citadel: the Battle of Kursk" by Robin Cross (Sarpedon, c1993).
The index is very poor. The large number of undifferentiated page references make it, in part, useless. For example, under "Hitler, Adolf" we find over 60 page numbers or page ranges strung uselessly together. Similarly, under "Richthofen, Wolfram Freiherr von" we find 42 page numbers/page ranges en bloc. Under "Fliegerkorps VIII" 56 page references are clustered together. Undoubtedly this makes for a shorter index. But, as Einstein once remarked, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."
The Luftwaffe campaign in the East reflects all the intrinsic contradictions, strengths and weakness, brilliant successes, tragic failures, and unparalleled human cost, of this titanic conflict between two profoundly antagonistic world views. If Hayward's text represents the high-water mark of scholarship regarding Luftwaffe actions on the Eastern Front, the fully-fledged, three-dimensional account of this unprecedented carnage remains to be written.
Dénes Bernád, Aviation Historian and Authorreviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, page 10, 11
