This is an account of the flying career of Johannes Kaufman, starting as a new recruit undergoing basic flying training with the Luftwaffe in 1935, and ending the war as the commander of a Staffel of Me.109s desperately trying to defend Berlin in the closing days of the war. He served on the Eastern Front and in occupied France.

Selected early on for training as an instructor, Kaufmann flew many various types of aircraft, and his account of flying and front-line operations is quite technical but has a certain immediacy. This is the book's strength. What it is less enlightening about is Johannes Kaufmann himself. Beyond making a few guarded comments about the political situation, his opinions, feelings and personal life are not touched on. He makes one unguarded reference to attending a speech by Hitler and being engaged by his rhetoric, but that was a single occurrence. Kaufmann was not otherwise politically engaged.

(In his introduction, the historian Richard Overy makes reference to this; at one point early in his career, Kaufmann comments on flying over Dachau, and Overy is critical that Kaufmann made no comment about the concentration camp there. In fact, reading the episode, we find that Kaufmann was on a particularly taxing training flight, and Dachau is referenced for its geography alone.)

This does raise a wider question. Aviators are often said to have, at the same time, both a wider perspective because of the reality of flying, and a lack of perspective because of their elevated viewpoint. Flying does detach you from what is happening on the ground; Kaufmann is no exception here, and of any German wartime memoir, this one has little opinion on events on the ground.

His perspective on the Luftwaffe is interesting. He paints a picture of an organisation that is quite bureaucratically minded, that insists on working through channels and not encouraging initiative, where roles are effectively siloed - Kaufmann's experiences in ground attack on the Eastern Front are a particular example of this, where pilots' own observations of the disposition of Russian forces are discounted because they were not reconnaissance pilots from a reconnaissance unit. Determining the disposition of the enemy is the duty of such units and the intelligence corps, and no-one else's input to that process is appropriate.

It is also interesting to note that in 1944 and 1945, Kaufmann was still being posted to units to trial new aircraft types, in particular the highly flawed Messerschmitt Me.210, or sent on training courses at a time when the need for front-line pilots could have been assumed to have been paramount. And aircraft could eventually go unserviceable for a lack of spare parts; Kaufmann was often called upon to ferry aircraft back to maintenance units, only to be told on arrival that it was easier to replace the aircraft than repair it. This is quite illustrative of one of the major reasons for Germany's defeat in 1945; Hitler in particular had an almost "arts and crafts" idea of industrial production, and Germany was extremely slow to adopt methods of mass production, preferring to produce highly technical and complex aircraft by teams of skilled mechanics. It was easier to supply a new aeroplane than it was to organise the mass production of components and organise a complex spares distribution network. Extend this across the whole realm of war production and supply, and one reason for Germany's defeat becomes evident; that they could not keep pace with the industrial production of Russia and the USA, no matter how individually brilliant and courageous their military might be.

As I said, we learn nothing of Kaufmann the man; although he refers to home leave, his family or taking time out on leave in Berlin or Warsaw, we are told nothing about his family, his aspirations or his personal likes and dislikes. This ten year journal of one man's career tells us nothing about the man except that he was a skilled pilot. His account ends with his last operational touchdown, from a weather flight over Berlin on 1st May 1945. We have no account of how Johannes Kaufmann's war ended, or what he did next.

The book is translated by an experienced aviation journalist, so the text reads well and accurately; it has been edited because in this book's first (German) edition, there seemed to be an almost minute-by-minute account of every single take-off and landing. (After all, its original title in German translates as "My flying report".) This has been reduced to something much more manageable. There are no illustrations in the text, and only a handful on the book dust jacket.

For the serious student of Luftwaffe history and operations, this book is a useful source and a good first-hand account. But for anyone interested in what ordinary Germans were thinking during the Third Reich, prospective readers will want to look elsewhere. ( )