A Loser's Scrapbook

I FLEW FOR THE FUHRER (213 pp.)--Heinz Knoke (translated by John Ewinq] --Holt ($3).

Carved into the memory of every combat pilot are moments of total recall--the unforgettable glimpses of a foeman starting to smoke, the inescapable sounds of the typewriter-tapping of tracer on fuselage and rudder. Captain Heinz Knoke, winner of Nazi Germany's coveted Rit-terkreuz and the youngest squadron commander in the Luftwaffe, pinpoints his most vivid memory high above Helgoland, one July day in 1943. In I Flew for the Fuehrer, Knoke tells how his Messerschmitt squadron loaded up with 500-lb. fragmentation bombs and climbed high above a formation of U.S. Flying Fortresses. To break up the deadly formation, which few German fighters could penetrate, Knoke was experimenting with a dangerous new technique: dropping bombs on the bombers.

"A fantastic scene is produced by the explosions," he wrote afterward. "The . . . formation is disorganized completely. Some of the Fortresses plunge down in steep dives . . . three simultaneously go down to crash . . . My men are completely carried away . . . We can pick [the enemy] off one by one! One after another [the Fortresses] go down in flames to crash into the sea. Only large patches of burning oil remain on the surface."

In that single encounter, reports Knoke, the U.S.A.F. lost eleven bombers, the Germans only one. Knoke chalked up his 13th combat kill, and his mechanics carried him shoulder-high from his cockpit. The bombing technique delighted his superiors. His colonel, he wrote, "bleats away happily ... I hope his monocle will not fall into his cup of cocoa in the excitement."

Fuehrer Knows Best. A jerky mixture of airman's logbook and autobiography, Knoke's is the first full-dress narrative to appear in the U.S., told by one of the losers, of the great air battles that were fought over Western Europe in World War II. As a professional flyer's scrapbook, it makes gripping, convincing reading, but it is spoiled, perhaps inevitably, by a scum of Nazi notions that nine years' retrospect and the detergent efforts of a British editor have signally failed to remove. Introducing Knoke, Lieut. General (ret.) Elwood R. ("Pete") Quesada, wartime chief of the Ninth Tactical Air Command in Europe, says: "He was a fine airman, very brave, and an excellent pilot. I would have liked having him in one of my own squadrons, had he been from a different mold."

Knoke's mold was that of most young Germans raised in Hitler's Reich. Born in Hamelin town, the son of a Prussian policeman who believed in the strap (for discipline) and the rifle (for exercise), he was press-ganged into the Hitler Youth and taught that the Fuehrer knows best. When Germany attacked Poland ("to liberate the terrorized Germans"), Knoke wrote in his diary: "The prospect of actually experiencing war rather appeals to me."

Good Emil. His German air force training started with ill-fitting uniforms and clodhopper boots, loneliness, the desire to "bash [the NCO] over the head with a rifle butt," the eternally drummed-in theme: "You have got to be tough as Krupp's steel."

Flying came slowly to Recruit Knoke. It took him 94 flights to learn to solo, and there followed one forced landing (severe head injuries), one snarled undercarriage and a first-class crash (more head injuries). When he arrived at an operational unit and met the veterans, his gleaming new badges of rank seemed as useless as any young American's did.

Like many a young pilot, Knoke made an idol of his plane, a Messerschmitt 109 which he called Good Emil. He was so scared and excited on his first mission, a strafing run over the Thames estuary, that he forgot to fire at the target. But he soon tasted blood in Russia, flying alongside Stuka bombers as they chopped up Soviet columns. He was vastly enjoying the war when They--the anonymous, know-nothing They which is GHQ to every operational airman--shipped him back to Germany to patrol the North Sea. There Knoke learned that boredom is the first reality of war. He flew 100 patrols over grey, faceless ocean, with scarcely a sight of the British Blenheim bombers that were ranging the German coast. "We all live together as airmen, in a strange little world of our own, at the end of the runway."

Heavy Babies. Knoke ached for combat, and in the bloody days of 1943 it hit him with a bang. His radio told of "heavy babies in [sector] Anton-Quelle-eight," and Knoke saw some 300 Liberators, "like a great bunch of grapes, shimmering in the sky." He attacked head on and got the surprise of his life. "I almost scrape [one] fat belly as I dive past. Then I am caught in the slipstream, buffeted about so violently that ... I wonder if my tailplane has been shot away . . . Damn all this metal in the air."

Over Kiel, Knoke had time to watch the heavy babies in action. "They dump their load right on the Germania shipyards. I am impressed by the precision with which those bastards bomb; it is fantastic." But precision had its price: by the end of 1943, Knoke had shot down 20 Allied planes, and had himself been shot down twice. A fat man in scarlet boots rewarded him with the Gold Cross.

"Close up," commented Knoke, "I am forced to the conclusion that [Reichs-marshal Goring] uses cosmetics."

Coffin Lid. The turning point of the air war came when the Allies sent long-range fighters--Mustangs, Lightnings and Thunderbolts--to escort daylight bombers deep into the Reich. Engaged on equal terms, and soon outnumbered, the Messerschmitts came off worst. Knoke was shot down twice more in a month, but even after he suffered a fractured skull, he flew on. "Every time I have an enemy in my sights ... I watch him crash, coldly and dispassionately, without any sense of triumph."

Every day the line of portraits pasted up for pilots who did not return from "the great fighter graveyard of the west" grew longer in Knoke's mess. Morale slumped; defeat stared. "Every time I close the canopy," Knoke wrote in August 1944, "I feel that I am closing the lid of my own coffin . . . Every day, the number of aircraft diminishes . . . The German Fighter Command is slowly bleeding to death."

The end came for Captain Knoke not in air combat, as he had hoped ("If I ram one of the Yanks, I shall be able to take him with me"), but in an automobile crash in Czechoslovakia. Partisan bombs wrecked his staff car, crippled his legs for life. He dragged out the war in convalescence, nursing the tattered logbook that recorded 2,000 flights, 400 combat missions, 52 confirmed kills.

Knoke the German airman fought like a true professional. But what of Heinz Knoke, German citizen? In his first chapter, he comments that his old allegiance, the Hitler Youth, "eventually became intolerable because of failure to apply correctly . . . the fundamental principles of National Socialism." He ends his story on something like the same note: "The war is lost ... It is useless for us to trouble ourselves now over such academic questions as responsibility and war guilt."

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