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BLACK TULIP: A POOR EXCUSE FOR A CREDITABLE BOOK
I came to this book, "BLACK TULIP: The Life and Myth of Erich Hartmann, the World's Top Fighter Ace" with rather high expectations. As a longtime aviation enthusiast, I first became aware of Erich Hartmann (1922-1993), the great Luftwaffe fighter ace, as a teen in 1978 from reading Edward Sims' book 'The Aces Talk.' I later went on to read several other books that either exclusively focused on Hartmann's wartime achievements on the Eastern Front and life postwar or referred to his combat career in passing.
This book "BLACK TULIP" was a setup by both its author and publisher to convince the reader that some startling new revelatory information about Hartmann himself and his wartime service in the Luftwaffe had been uncovered that would cast serious doubt on the veracity of earlier works about Hartmann and show him to be a disreputable character shaped by his experiences from growing up in Nazi Germany. Frankly, what the author had to say about Hartmann was not revelatory nor original. What's more: some of what he added in the book as a way to lend clarity to his argument about Hartmann were either historically inaccurate or little more than an empty filler to make the book more weighty and scholarly than it really is. For instance, the author referred several times to the German military of World War I as the Wehrmacht. There was no Wehrmacht between 1914 and 1918! The German military between 1871 (when Germany became a unified country) and 1918 was known officially as 'das Deutsche Heer' or the German Army. The Wehrmacht did not come into being until 1935, which was also when Hitler introduced mandatory conscription and the Luftwaffe was formally established as a distinct branch of the German armed forces.
This is the author's first book and I think - as some budding writers will do - he tried too hard to impress readers with weak arguments meant to show Hartmann as disingenuous and dishonest with his war record and his attitude about having fought for Germany. Well, if you're going to indict Erich Hartmann, the top fighter ace of all time, then you might as well indict every German man and woman who served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Certainly, some of them committed crimes against humanity. But one cannot indict the Wehrmacht en masse for war crimes carried out by some in its ranks.
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