On Footnotes

The book has been criticised for not using footnotes. I understand that criticism. Like any well-behaved historian I tried to have the usual footnotes but in the end I gave up. It simply didn't make sense.

What I ended up doing instead was a Notes on Sources section. For each chapter, I provide the reader with the most useful and important sources. This is a more qualitative approach, easier to read but does not provide full traceability. I knew that it would make the book less useful for academia. This was accepted. They were not the intended market.

But why didn't footnotes make sense for what I was writing? Good question. One pretty good answer is that there simply aren't a lot of sources to reference. But that is not unique for what I was doing, that's a standard problem. A deeper answer is probably the focus of the book, the "how" instead of the more common "what" and "when". Much of the book consists of what basically amounts to my own conclusions based on my own professional experience in areas like navigation, radio, radar, gunnery, weather, aerodynamics etc. Writing the book, I did what we theoretical physicists are trained to do, build theories that agree with available experimental data. Or, in cases, built on nothing but logic. This made referencing, using footnotes, awkward. It was also of doubtful value since so much depended on my own experience anyway. Which is probably why footnoting felt like the wrong tool.

Would it be possible to tweak the usual footnoting/referencing in some way in order to have it make better sense when doing a work of this type? The need for traceability is certainly real. Physicists certainly have the same need and they also use footnotes. I don't have a good answer here. A simple answer would be that I'm my own source but that is neither satisfactory nor true.

Anyway, a byproduct of having used this approach is that I've become quite critical of how much of history is traditionally written. There is tendency to simply hoard facts. The more detailed facts, the better. The problem is that after painstakingly finding and presenting (and footnoting) all these facts, much is still poorly understood. To quote Albert Einstein: "Any fool can know. The point is to understand.". Knowing is not enough. You have to understand what you are talking about on a deeper level, in this case the engineering and physics of it all. Without that understanding, descriptions and conclusions can be quite wrong. As shown by all the myths busted in the book.