>Also, have just finished Peter Kilduff's "Richthofen, Beyond the
>Legend of the Red Baron" and was semi-disapointed. It's very much
>a quick pastiche of the man and his career and doesn't really get
>into any meat. The superficial nature of the text combined with the
>authors inability or lack of desire to draw any new or interesting
>conclusions left me unsatisfied.
>
I concur, it was a competent effort but really not much new or interesting.
But, perhaps there is just not much new or interesting left to say
about MvR. After all, he was just a German captain who flew a
fighter plane - exceedingly well, to be sure, but in the end, he was
-just- a fighter pilot. There have probably been more books on MvR than
on Haig or Petain or Ludendorff put together yet, in the overall scheme
of things, MvR's aerial exploits are really something of a sideshow.
Sigh! I fear I have committed heresy! Yet, as I've become convinced
that Billy Bishop was a fraud, I might as well take the final step and
renounce the faith altogether. <gr>
Cheers and happy new year anyway. May your rigging always remain taunt!
-- Bill Shatzer - bshatzer@orednet.org -or- aw177@Freenet.Carleton.ca - "Most any experience from prison life is transferable to political life, since the same kind of characters inhabit both worlds." -Frank Peters-