34 machines, the constraint each design was really fighting, and the price every clever solution extracted somewhere else. The war behind the war, in print.
Both contain all 34 case files in full. The difference is the reference section at the back.
Six parts · 34 machines · 48 pages
Without the reference section: no comparison tables, charts, timeline, glossary, myth corrections or checklists.
Field Edition — €19.99Everything · 34 machines · 58 pages
It comes out of the research that already built the channel.
Wartime production and casualty figures are not settled. Totals shift depending on whether prototypes, rebuilds and post-capture completions are counted, and forced-labour death tolls are estimates by nature. Where the sources genuinely disagree, this book gives you a range and says so, rather than picking the most dramatic figure and presenting it as fact. That is the whole difference between history and content.
Six parts, organised by domain. Every entry follows the same four beats.
T-34 sloped armour, the Christie suspension, the Tiger's price, the Panther's final drive, the Sherman's real advantage, and the tank that swam ashore on D-Day.
Why the B-17 came home, the Bf 109's small-airframe discipline, the Spitfire's elliptical wing, the Zero's fatal lightness, the Merlin transplant, the wooden bomber, and the Corsair's killer stall.
Yamato's 18.1-inch secret, Bismarck's out-of-date armour, the two rudders that doomed her, the canal that shaped Iowa, and the carrier deck argument.
Why the Type VII wasn't really a submarine, sixty men and one toilet, the snorkel that made crews bleed, and the Type XXI that arrived too late.
The cavity magnetron, the shell that knew when to explode, Enigma as an engineering problem, welding the Liberty ships, and the precision bombing that wasn't.
The V-2's real accounting, the jet with no metal to build it from, 188 tonnes of bad arithmetic, and why the Ho 229 was never a stealth bomber.
Comparison tables, production charts, a year-by-year timeline, six myths corrected, a glossary, and three printable checklists.
No. The videos were the starting point, and every entry goes further than the format allowed — the trade-off analysis, the comparison tables, the production figures and the myth corrections are all new material written for print.
The facts will mostly be familiar. The framing probably won't be. This book is organised around what each design cost, not what it achieved, and that inverts a lot of the usual arguments about which machine was best.
No. Every concept is explained from scratch in plain language, and there's a glossary at the back. You need no engineering background — only curiosity about why things were built the way they were.
Figures are drawn from standard published sources, and where those sources disagree the book gives a range and says so rather than picking the most dramatic number. Contested claims are flagged as contested.
A PDF — 58 pages for the Complete Handbook, 48 for the Field Edition — formatted for both screen and home printing on standard Letter paper. The download link arrives immediately after checkout — no waiting, no shipping.
Seven days, full refund, no questions asked. Email and it's done. If the book doesn't earn its place on your shelf, it shouldn't have your money.
34 case files across 6 parts. The Complete Handbook adds 8 charts and diagrams, 3 comparison tables, a timeline, a glossary and 3 printable checklists.
Get The Complete Handbook — €29.99Just want the case files? Field Edition — €19.99