My name is Ruy Ernesto Jesus Horta, well...Ruy Horta for short. I'm a true modern European in the sense that I'm part Dutch and part Portuguese, although living in Holland makes the Dutch side predominant.

I came to this world on April 4th 1971 and have been blessed with a good life. Well sometimes a little too good, which didn't really help with my study, hence I must consider my academic life a failure. OTOH, a background in Political Science makes for good barroom conversation...if you don't push your views too much.

At this moment I'm working for the I.N.G. Group as a junior I.T. guy (at 29!) trying to start a career, well I guess nothing a little luck and some hard work won't cure.

Life itself though, couldn't be better. I live with a great woman, who loves me more then I could possibly deserve. My parents still love me, even though I did not become a captain of industry nor great academic or cunning politician. And well...I can still do what I like most of all, well second most perhaps, that's throw away tons of time and money at my favorite hobbies.

Well finally we have reached the point that any of you reading this cares about, why all this?

The best way I can explain it is that I am simply fascinated with History. Besides history in general, I am in particular interested in the history of warfare, not just wars, but what leads to them, the workings of politics and war, the workings of society and war, or simply man and war.

Technology is but a small cog of warfare, as are individual men, single battles and even a campaign, however the combined picture, the deeper understanding of a conflict, that's my main aim.

As I cannot dig into every conflict since the coming of man, I've somehow stuck to World War 2, and in my particular case, the German side of that conflict. Now don't get me wrong. To get any clear picture of one side, one must naturally study, or at least attempt to, both sides of the struggle.

Even though this is a page "dedicated" to the wartime Luftwaffe, it doesn't mean that I am blind to the workings of the Heer or the Kriegsmarine, on the contrary, studying it exposes the weaknesses and strengths of all the branches of the (German) military leading up to and during WW2.

In the end, by studying the varied nature of the German Armed Forced, both in WW2, but also before, we get a better understanding of warfare, more so then we would achieve by studying a winning power fighting for the greater good of mankind, at least that's how history is written.

Books, books and more books. I love the touch of them, the smell of them, even when it is an old one and it really doesn't smell nice, its often the beautiful smell of rare copy or a bargain find. One book's bibliography leads to another search. I simply love it!

In this anonymous world of the Internet, I'd just thought you might like to know a little about the man behind the box, me.

Just some rambling from Ruy Horta...