WWII Aircraft Resource

[SShrike]

Can anyone recommend a good web site that has good reference material and information on many WWII aircraft? I have many books but I was hoping to find a site with some technical data and other interesting content

Thanks. 

[Yo-Yo_Kirby]

wwiiaircraftperformance.org is the most obvious one. You can find plenty of reference figures for aircraft performance of World War II fighters. Many details are available for American, British, and German aircraft, but you won't find too much about Italian, Soviet, and Japanese aircraft. The ww2aircraft.net forums have plenty of good info, but make sure the info you take from the forum posts is properly-sourced. There is a lot of disinformation in various threads.

There are a few online resources delve into technical aspects of Bf 109s. kurfurst.org has plenty of performance figures and goes into more detail about different Bf 109 versions. 

Watch the videos of Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles for both deep historical and aerodynamic aspects of the aircraft. They're quite time-consuming though, but there is also a lot of myth busting as a result of the long videos. Greg occasionally cites some of the documents accessible from wwiiaircraftperformance.org. His presentation is very solid. The YouTube channel Military Aviation History gives very detailed information about both the big picture, but he doesn't necessarily delve too deep into aerodynamics. There's very interesting trivia like how a musician helped solve the vibration issues in the Me 262s engines. Calum Douglas is an author researching aircraft engine development of World War II and has a few YouTube videos up about piston engines.

John Romain is a very prominent figure in the warbird restoration community. I recently read one of the articles on his website about the Bf 109E, Mastering the Emil. I learned specifically how they maintained Bf 109s, particularly having to remove oil from the inverted V12 engine to prevent long-term damage after each flight. Then they removed cleaned the spark plugs after that. He also delves very deep in flying the aircraft including mistakes to avoid. There are techniques described in the article about how to prevent the landing gear from breaking under too much pressure during takeoff and landing.

If you want to learn more about Japanese aircraft, one of the friends I met through War Thunder, -Juno- TakaLeon, has some Japanese aircraft documentaries with English subtitles. Yes, he has a lot of War Thunder gameplay videos at the top, but scroll down enough, and you will find the good stuff. An entire documentary on the Zero is up, which details both the development and combat usage of the A5M and A6M. There are also Japanese-made animations aiming to recreate actual air and naval battles that have been translated. Overall, he's a great starting resource for Japanese aircraft.

This is a Japanese blog focusing on the technical details about Japanese WW2 aircraft. Use DeepL translate to read the info in English language. There are some quirks from the translations, of course. Literal engine translations differ for sure. Not too long ago, there was an article about the performance metrics of different G4M variants from the G4M1 Model 11 to the G4M2e (Ohka carrier) that was posted. Alternatively, you can read Aviation of Japan, which posts articles in English about model making and history.

HistoryNet has plenty of detailed histories of WW2 planes.

Commando Supremo is the best English-language source I can find about the history of Italian aircraft.

VVS Air War is a good place to start with Soviet aircraft.

This is the best website dedicated to the Tempest.

For the Mosquito, here you go.

Liberator Crew is still up after all these years. This website is dedicated to the B-24 itself and the creator's father and the crew he flew with.

As always, not all of the information you see on these may be correct. All these have varying levels of credibility. They are my top picks so far. Books may still do a better job at finding information that is not easily accessible on websites.

There is a certain Discord server I am in with lots and lots of primary source documents and discussions regarding WW2 aircraft. It's a very small one though. PM me if you are interested in joining.

Edited February 17, 2021 by Yo-Yo_Kirby