Arnold Doring's memoir of his experiences in the Second World War while serving as a pilot in the Luftwaffe, here published in English for the first time by Pen and Sword (who were kind enough to provide me with an ARC for review purposes) was something of a disappointment to me. I have read many memoirs of Axis and Allied aviators, and they are something of a mixed bag. The best of them offer useful insights into
the mindsets of the people involved and sometimes startling revelations in terms of their personal perspectives on events. I would not put this into that category, Certainly there is material here of use as a primary source, but that said, the author is not much given to introspection. It reads like a series of vignettes decontextualized by an individual who never seems to much concern himself with a broader context. The writing, while well edited and copiously annotated, seems to me to add little to our understanding of events from the time, and the character of the writer comes across as entirely lacking in development (remember that I mentioned the truly juvenile lack of introspection which characterizes the young aviator). There may be some value in some of the vignettes which are presented in, again, a kind of deconstructed way, but overall, there is no overarching narrative here, as one might expect in the diary of a young man not given to introspection or self-examination. The work has some value in a special collection for the use of historians already well versed with the context, but I can see little appeal much beyond that.