Over Fields of Fire
Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45
Ratings1
Average rating2
In itself, it could have been a very good memoirs - the human side is honest and engaging.
Unfortunately, the book is slightly dragged down by the fact the author is not an intelligent person (naive at best, way less than smart most probably) and greatly dragged down by the strong propaganda content and approach, by the several episodes completely lacking believability (obvious and technically ridiculous lies, such as an already damaged ground attack plane shooting down 4 enemy dedicated fighters, alone, or 2 crappy I16 going against 6 much more modern Me109 and winning the fight, and more in this vein) and the typical hateful Russian schizophrenia: when a Russian shoots down Germans, great hero, amazing brave, what a guy and so on; when the enemy shoots down Russians, they are always "scum, vultures, jackals".
The enemy is also never Germans (or Romanians, Italians and so on) they are always all fully "Hitlerites, Fascists", and of course plenty of "scum", "crawling" and so on. Among those scum were my grandfather (returned, but fucked up) and grandmother's brother (KIA) and they never called the Russian enemy anything else than soldiers or humans, even in private talks, just like many other ww2 (Romanian, so Axis) veterans i read or spoke to, including ground attack pilots (so the exact same thing as Egorova, minus the blind hatred). They actually pitied those they bombed, while this author always and strongly enjoys it.
Overall, a potentially good book brought down by propaganda, ridiculous "hunter's stories" and blind hatred.
In itself, it could have been a very good memoirs - the human side is honest and engaging.
Unfortunately, the book is slightly dragged down by the fact the author is not an intelligent person (naive at best, way less than smart most probably) and greatly dragged down by the strong propaganda content and approach, by the several episodes completely lacking believability (obvious and technically ridiculous lies, such as an already damaged ground attack plane shooting down 4 enemy dedicated fighters, alone, or 2 crappy I16 going against 6 much more modern Me109 and winning the fight, and more in this vein) and the typical hateful Russian schizophrenia: when a Russian shoots down Germans, great hero, amazing brave, what a guy and so on; when the enemy shoots down Russians, they are always "scum, vultures, jackals".
The enemy is also never Germans (or Romanians, Italians and so on) they are always all fully "Hitlerites, Fascists", and of course plenty of "scum", "crawling" and so on. Among those scum were my grandfather (returned, but fucked up) and grandmother's brother (KIA) and they never called the Russian enemy anything else than soldiers or humans, even in private talks, just like many other ww2 (Romanian, so Axis) veterans i read or spoke to, including ground attack pilots (so the exact same thing as Egorova, minus the blind hatred). They actually pitied those they bombed, while this author always and strongly enjoys it.
Overall, a potentially good book brought down by propaganda, ridiculous "hunter's stories" and blind hatred.