Luftwaffe 1946

During the Second World War, German designers were developing projects well beyond their time. Some magnificent machines even entered the service but many of them remained in various phases of developing from drawings to prototypes. That warbirds are what we call today Luftwaffe 1946 projects. These birds are of great interest today for many researchers and modelers so it is no wonder that they are the topic of many books written so far.

Aero Journal Hors Serie 3 covers a vide range of Luftwaffe 1946 fighters. All major manufacturers of Nazi Germany are covered in 13 chapters on 116 pages written in French with scale drawings in 1/144, 1/72 and 1/48 scale. Projects are well illustrated with color profiles and some 3-D models of the projects. The book starts with Arado followed with Blohm & Voss, Dornier, Focke-Wulf, Horten, Heinkel, Henschel, Junkers, Lippisch, Messerschmitt and Skoda projects. Interesting part is that the author provided some photos of allied post WW II airplanes developed from the German projects. Two pages of this magnificent publication cover the German – Japanese cooperation on projects Kikka and Shushui.

One chapter is devoted to the Operation Paperclip. After WWII ended in 1945, victorious Russian and American intelligence teams began a treasure hunt throughout occupied Germany for military and scientific booty. They were looking for things like new rocket and aircraft designs, medicines, and electronics. But they were also hunting down the most precious “spoils” of all: the scientists whose work had nearly won the war for Germany. The U.S. Military rounded up Nazi scientists and brought them to America. It had originally intended merely to debrief them and send them back to Germany. But when it realized the extent of the scientists knowledge and expertise, the War Department decided it would be a waste to send the scientists home. Following the discovery of flying discs (foo fighters), particle/laser beam weaponry in German military bases, the War Department decided that NASA and the CIA must control this technology, and the Nazi engineers that had worked on this technology.

This publication is an excellent reference for people interested in Nazi projects and their later developments. Being the scale modeller myself, I can highly recommend the publication to all fellow modellers interested in subject. Perhaps in the future editions of Hors Serie we can expect German bombers and who knows perhaps some Japanese secret projects could be there.
This publication is highly recommended.

More about this book can be found at Aero Journal site.

Darko Mladenovic

Special thanks to Srecko Bradic, Aero Journal illustrator, for providing me this publication for review purposes.