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anyone except the Russians the air war was a man’s world—did their first reading about the war the same way I did. Out there in Australia, I read Flames in the Sky , by Pierre Clostermann, and dozens of other books like it. In Germany, the youngsters read about such highly decorated night flyers as Major Heinz Wolfgang Schnaufer, who shot down a scarcely believable 121 RAF bombers. Books with cheap titles like Luftwaffe at War showed young war buffs of the English-speaking world what the air war over Europe had been like. Except, apparently, for Sebald, Germans of my age saw books just like them: hundreds of photographs, but with the captions in their language instead of ours. Sometimes the captions were approximately informed junk, but in many cases they were expertly done. Put all that pulp and glossy publishing together and it added up to an information system: a system that helped prepare a young intelligence to make properly considered judgments later on. It was information that Sebald could have made something of, if he had seen enough of it. But it seems likely that he was shut off from informatively trivial publications by his exclusive concern with serious publications, and in this one area heended up running thin on facts. In Austerlitz he can write a sublime cantata dedicated to Liverpool Street Station because he turned himself back into a wide-eyed young observer before he sat down to write. About that subject, to achieve his adult prose, he did the childish thing, and became a fan. About the air war, he didn’t have the same deep background.
    On the market stall I picked up one of those elementary-looking, large-format illustrated war books in which it is a moot point whether the chapters are long captions or the captions are short chapters. Purporting to be an account of the Luftwaffe from 1933 to 1945, this one was called Hitler’s Eagles: an unpromising title. There was even less promise in the author’s name: Chris McNab. He sounded as if he might also have written picture books about motorcycles. But after only a quick skip-through, Hitler’s Eagles stood revealed as the work of an expert, so I broke my own embargo—no more picture books about anything—and took it home.
    Most of the pictures of German planes and pilots I had seen before in the Nazi magazine Signal , from which a file of extracts is still on my shelves even after the most recent culling of my books. (My great source for that kind ofstuff, incidentally, used to be one of the bookstalls under the arches at Friedrichstrasse railway station. I would go there whenever I was in Berlin, but since I got sick I have not been back.) There were only so many photographs of, say, Werner Hartmann, the Luftwaffe ace of aces who shot down an astonishing 352 enemy aircraft, most of them on the Eastern Front. By now all the photographs of him and his fellow aces have shown up somewhere; and likewise there will probably be no more previously unseen images of the Me262 jet fighters as they taxied out to use up the last few drops of Nazi Germany’s fuel. But the text is full of observation, judgment, and accurate detail, and those things are always new.
    An excellent chapter on the night fighters tells us that in the last phase of the war they were pressed into service against the American bombers in daylight, with shocking losses. Weighed down by their radar equipment and aerials, they were easy meat for the American long-range day fighters. McNab has read the German sources and knows that in the group of Pathfinders assigned to mark the target for an RAF night raid, the leading plane was nicknamed the Zeremonienmeister (master of ceremonies). This is the kind of detail which tends to run thin in the more serioushistories: their authors just aren’t thrilled enough by the machinery. You could call it Small Boys’ Knowledge: in my generation, the generation which is now growing old and getting ready to die, there were always small boys who could