‘My interest in German military firearms goes back many years to my childhood, a cap-firing luger and an early encounter with a Boer War Mauser rifle on display in Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Eventually “after a somewhat chequered career” I was asked to write a general introduction to the subject for Arms & Armour Press, which was then a division of Cassells. The result was Guns of the Reich, Firearms of the German Forces, 1939-1945‚ written under the pseudonym of George Markham and published in 1989. Part of a series of four, this was not only extremely successful but also generated some lively correspondence. Since then, however, there have been very real advances. This is largely due to a change of attitude in Germany, which undoubtedly has its origins in the contacts made between British and American collectors and German enthusiasts. I can pinpoint one such year: 1979, when Joachim Görtz was employed by Motor-Buch Verlag of Stuttgart to assist with the translation of my book Luger into German. Joachim (who, sadly, died in 2002) was convinced that information still existed in Germany to challenge many of the spurious claims being made in collecting circles in Britain and the USA, and embarked on a quest that led to first to Die Pistole 08, published in 1985, and then to an obsession with details that he cheerfully shared throughout the 1990s with the gun-collecting fraternity. The discovery of archival material is undoubtedly encouraging some researchers to delve ever-deeper into the minutiae of Third Reich small-arms history, but is creating problems that have perhaps always been evident with any collectable objects. Ever-increasing specialisation leads collectors to pursue variations‚ that can often be ascribed to nothing other than to the vagaries of individual marking punches, and place themselves at the mercy of entrepreneurs who are only too willing to indulge their whims on the flimsiest of evidence. Specialisation also tends to promote detailed studies of individual topics, often extending over hundreds of pages of the most arcane detail, at the expense of the concise overviews that are essential to introduce new blood‚ to the subject. There was a time when these narrative histories were concise and eloquent, but the trend now is often towards size, jargon and complexity. Fortunately, during preparatory work for Guns of the Third Reich, I read and re-read Captain Sir Basil Liddell-Hart‚s classic History of the Second World War, which reminded me that even the most complicated historical study can be easy to read. If Guns of the Third Reich manages to tread the same path, I will have done my job well.’ John Walter Guns of the Third Reich will be published later this year. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 128 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com