Junkers Ju 88: Star of the Luftwaffe

A history of the Junkers Ju.88, concentrating on the production and variant history of the type. There were a lot of variants, especially as the war began to draw to a close, and concentrating on this aspect makes the account rather disjointed. Variant histories are interspersed with accounts from

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the operational record, but not all these are sufficiently complete to be of interest. The type's history with other nations' air forces is barely mentioned, other than two pages of photographs of Romanian aircraft inserted without break after a chapter on the Mistel guided bomb combinations. Finnish, Hungarian and Italian aircraft and operations are not mentioned, neither (apart from one photograph of a crashed British captured example) are captured aircraft flown by the British, French and Soviet air forces.

The Ju.88 was the basis for the Ju.188 and Ju.388 variants (the Ju.188 was originally designated as the Ju.88B), and many of the later Ju.88 variants actually employed components of the later Ju.188 in particular. It would have made more sense to cover the manufacturing, variant and operational history of these later types in the same book.

Photographs are typical for a book of the period, being not exceptionally well presented in a lot of cases with a very restricted tonal range. Many photographs are of obscure sub-type prototypes, and so are of little interest to modellers and many other enthusiasts.

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