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This book looks at the vast range of secret weapon that were developed in German before and during the Second World War, a period in which German engineers were ahead of the world in many areas.
A glance at the list of chapters reveals the amazingly broad scope of German weapon research during the Second World War. Some are well known - the jet aircraft or the V-1 and V-2 rockets - while others are relatively obscure - the German helicopter program or the various guided missile projects being good examples.
This is a very well illustrated book, containing a good selection of contemporary pictures of all but the most obscure of these weapons, supported by full colour illustrations.
This book is firmly based in reality, with none of the flights of fantasy that sometimes mar this sort of work. This is best illustrated by the brief section on the German nuclear weapon program, dismissed here as the near total failure it actually was, and not the major threat it is sometimes hyped up as.
One thing that becomes increasingly obvious while reading this book is how few of these projects actually produced a viable weapon. Entire research projects - the helicopter and the super-gun amongst them - soaked up vast amounts of money, used some of best engineers available to Germany - and produced little or no useful results. The shear amount of projects being carried out by the German arms industry was perhaps one of its greatest weakness, reducing the chance of success for any of them. Even those projects that did result in a workable weapon rarely paid back the amount of effort involved.
Chapters
Jet Aircraft
Rocket-powered Aircraft
Hybrid Aircraft and Gliders
Rotary-Wing Aircraft
Surface-to-Surface Missiles
Air-to-Air Weapons
Air-to-Surface Weapons
Surface-to-Air Missiles
Artillery
Tanks and Anti-Tank Weapons
Submarines and their Weapons
Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons
Author: Author
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 144
Publisher: Spellmount
Year: 2000