War Prizes: The Album

This book is a 'follow-up' to my earlier book War Prizes that was published in 1994, after many years of research into the subject of Axis aircraft captured and flown by the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries during and after the Second World War. My interest in the topic naturally continued, but the research for the original volume had quite exhausted the author and most of the readily available sources of information. Indeed, one reviewer proffered the opinion that the book was 'over-researched'. Thus, there has never been a great likelihood of a "Volume 2' with large numbers of further revelations in the subject matter.
However, in the intervening period quite large numbers of new photographs have come to light, and the expanding worldwide interest in the preservation nf historic aircraft has led to many restoration projects for aircraft of the types covered in War Prizes. While many of these have included wrecks recovered from the former Soviet Union or various Pacific islands that were occupied by the Japanese during the war, others have included actual 'war prizes' which had been stored in museum reserve collections until their reappearance in recent years. The opportunity has therefore been taken to illustrate survivors of all kinds, which have become available for public view over recent years. Also, the good offices of Yefim Gordon and his colleagues have provided a wealth of photographs from sources in Russia, filling many a gap in the very sparse coverage of the Soviet Union in the original volume. None of the photographs in this volume appear in the original book.
Although the research for the original book was quite thorough and used primary sources as much as possible, some new information has come to light, which is included in the tables of serial numbers at the end of the book. Surprisingly, a large proportion of the new information relates to the various types of German j et aircraft. This is no doubt in large measure due to public interest in the technology of the early jets, coupled with the project to build 'new' Messer-schmitt Me 262s in the USA. This has produced new information that corrects the histories of a few Messerschmitts published in the origincil volume. We are grateful to the many correspondents who responded to the original War Prizes by advising us of these items. In most cases, these offerings corrected previously published information, which we had been unable to track back to an original source when the first volume went to press. We are still looking for more material, so we do welcome photographs and data on the recovery and use of German, Italian and Japanese aircraft captured during the Second World War and subsequently flown by the countries that captured them.