I set fire to the tanks at THAMESHAVEN, that was between 15 and 16 hours. I counted 12 myself… Yes, a “Gruppe.” When I first started for this target, I thought over whether I should not change my objective, as I had seen two tankers at PORT VICTORIA which were just being unloaded at the quayside, and there are a good many oil tanks there. I got special mention in dispatches for that undertaking that was the best exploit during the whole battle of ENGLAND. It is pleasant when your success is immediately recognized; flying over LONDON is no review flight.104
Along with detailed discussions of technical questions, the visible aesthetic accompanying individual soldiers’ destructive prowess was perhaps the most central theme of German airmen’s conversations.
Interlocutors told stories of attacks and successful kills in the greatest possible detail and vividness of language:
FISCHER: We were over the THAMES estuary in a “190” and we fired at every boat we spotted. We hit the mast of one of them and off it came; it was quite a small ship. When we were flying with bombs we used to bomb factories. Once I was flying ahead, and the second pair were coming along behind me. It was near HASTINGS; there was a huge factory right beside the railway-line almost on the beach. The other man flew towards the town and dropped his bombs there. I saw the factory and thought how nicely it was smoking; I dropped a bomb, and bang! Up it went.
Once we bombed a station at FOLKESTONE just as a long passenger train was drawing out; down went the bomb right on to the train—oh boy! (Laughter.) Then alongside DEAL station there was a huge shed we bombed that, and I never saw anything like the flame that shot up—there was a terrific explosion. There must have been some highly inflammable stuff in the warehouse. Great bits flew up into the air before us, higher than we were flying ourselves.105
This is war as witnessed from above, from the perspective of bomber crews and, in particular, fighter pilots. War looks very different from the ground, where the destruction is actually taking place, where people are running, fleeing, and dying. The German Luftwaffe also suffered significant casualties, more than 1,700 from August 1, 1940, to March 31, 1941,106 but that contributed to the sporting character of airmen’s missions and their aesthetic experience of destruction.
Risk was an essential part of war, and it took particular skill and control over one’s machinery if one was to have any hope of surviving:
