The Horten Brothers and Their All-wing Aircraft By David Myhra A Book Review by Raul Blacksten
If you love to just sit and look at pictures, then you are gonna love this book. If you want to know about the Horten brothers, you will learn something from this book. If you love to read a well written and engrossing book, well, maybe you should look somewhere else.
All loyalty to Jan Scott and Peter Selinger aside, my alarm bells started going off before I even got past page six, that is, as I read the Forword. Here, Dr. Rolf Schroedter claims to have known the Hortens brothers since 1926 when they joined the Lower Rhine Union flying club Yet Schroedter states he is "pleased that for the first time, the whole story of the Horten brothers is being told in this book and of their lifelong effort to minimize aerodynamic drag and to increase wing lift."
What confused me as I read this statement was the existence of a book in the bookcase an arm's reach behind me. Nurflügel, Die Geschichte der Horten-Flugzeuge 1930-1960, by Reimar Horten and Peter F. Selinger (with Jan Scott), was published in 1987. Even more interesting is that Nurflügel was published just a year after Myhra claims to have concluded his "four year (1982-86) investigation of Reimar and Walter's forty years of all-wing airplane design work."
One important thing which Myhra did not have when he wrote this book, was a good editor. Poor grammar jumps off the page. In the Introduction, for example, Myhra says, "it is my hope that this book brings them [the Hortens????] closer to all persons and produces the justice of truth, which I believe their accomplishments and memories deserve" (italics are mine).
Poor paragraph construction often made me wonder what Myhra was trying to say--and there are a lot of awfully long and rambling paragraphs. Yet the book itself seems to ramble, so rambling paragraphs are not really so out of place, are they?
Then there are the things which really bothered me. Chief among them are Myhra's use of German words and titles. To pick just one thing, as I was taught, when you use a foreign word which is not in common usage in English, you italicize. For instance, "Luftwaffe" would not be italicized but "Jagdfluginspektion" (Fighter Inspection Command) should be. A minor point to be sure.
Myhra does seem to have done his research, no matter what I think of his style. Even here, I must say I have been told that when he was doing his research, Myhra went looking for all the dirt he could find. I will not comment about his research, but there is a lot of information here--and not all of it relevant.
One thing which does shine in this book (besides the slick paper) is that there are a lot of marvellous pictures. Probably if you put them all together, something like 200 pages of this 320 page book would be pictures. Still, even here were things to bother me. Why so many pictures of Herman Göring? Why are there three pictures of a B-17 factory? Why does Myhra sometimes use the same picture more than once? Why are so many aircraft mis-identified?
Thirty-three of the last 42 pages are the Appendices. Here Myhra has provided us with the "Complete Horten Aircraft Line." This is a chronological listing of 61 designs. There is also a list of 44 work numbers for gliders built during 1933-44. If you like 3-views, there are 59 of them. Finally, there is a handy German-British-American military rank conversion chart (why is this here?).
On the whole, if you are looking for a great--or even good book, this ain't it. Nevertheless, if you are interested in a book with a lot of Horten information and a lot of pictures, then this one just might fit your bill. At least it is in English.
Myhra, David. The Horten Brothers and Their All-wing Aircraft, Schiffer Military/Aviation History, Atglen, PA, 1998. List price: US$59.95. ISBN: 0-7643-0441-0
Raul Blacksten