(Note: I acknowledge this has nothing to do with B-17s or Tallmantz Aviation.)

I’ve been a member of the American Aviation Historical Society (AAHS) for decades and appreciate the work it does in the furtherance of documenting American aviation history. If you want some serious aviation history, you need to join the AAHS and help the cause. If you have some specific information, no matter how arcane, that needs to be published and documented, you should contribute for the AAHS Journal. The Journal has been published continuously since 1956 and it is an excellent resource for research. The articles in the Journal are indexed at the AAHS site. though I think you need to be a member to get good access to them. I’ve contributed a few articles over the many years to help further the goals of the AAHS.

I contributed another one recently. There has been much incorrect information about the Douglas DB-7s that went to the Netherlands East Indies in the early months of World War II, particularly with regard to the DB-7C torpedo bomber ordered in October 1941. Definitely an obscure subject, but I attempted to correct some of that incorrect information in a 2004 book entitled Douglas Havoc and Boston: The DB-7/A-20 Series published by Crowood Press in the UK (now long out of print). I thought it was a great book but it did not sell particularly well for reasons I won’t go into here. But there continues to be some bad information out there about the whole episode of the Dutch and its DB-7s, so I put together an article for the AAHS Journal that was published in January 2025 (Volume 69, Number 4: Winter 2024) titled Acquisition of the Douglas DB-7 and DB-7C for the Netherlands East Indies Navy, a catchy title if there ever was one (yes, and a title I wrote).

I was happy to see the article in the Journal but wasn’t particularly happy with the editing done for publication. I thought some good information had been deleted and, lacking that information, I thought there was an element of confusion unnecessarily added. Editing is a hard job and I acknowledge that, but I don’t see the value added in what was done in this case, as the article was only shortened by a bit. And, the last third of the footnoted documentation disappeared, much to my dismay.

In any event, I did what any anal author might do…I recast the article with the original text in the same format as it appears in the AAHS Journal. So, for the sake of posterity, I am providing my version of the original text in the linked document for anyone who has an interest in such things. I know there are a (very) few out there…