When the first edition of Volume 1 was published twenty years ago, it hit the WW II interested community as a bomb.
Richard Goldblatt at SimHqCom, called it ”without a doubt one of the finest aviation history books I’ve ever read,” and J.J. Fedorowicz called it ”an indispensable reference – highly recommended.”
At Stone & Stone it was voted as the No. 1 military history book of the year.
However, the first edition of Volume 1 was based on the amount of research undertaken by the authors in the late 1990s. Christer Bergström has continued his in-depth research into the subject ever since then, and the result is a new edition of Black Cross/Red Star, Volume 1 that exceeds the first edition regarding the quality of the material to the point that the new edition actually is a completely new book.
The first edition contained a maximum of 100,000 words. The second edition not only has much higher quality as far as the research is concerned but also contains twice that wordcount, a very large number of absolutely new photos (many of which are from pilot veterans’ photo albums and have never been published before).