Stuka: Letters from the Eastern Front

1939, Potsdam. Heinrich Kraft, 20 years old, son of a post office clerk. He volunteered to join the army, not for the Führer, not for the empire. Just because he heard the roar of the Junkers engine at the air show three years ago. He became a Stuka dive bomber pilot. In the back seat was Walter Brenner from Munich, with his permanently messy hair and a smile that showed his fangs. Together they flew over the wheat fields of France, over the fog of the English Channel, and finally plunged into the endless forests and mud of Russia. Summer in Minsk, fire in Smolensk, siege in Kiev, snow in front of Moscow. They dropped bombs, they evaded anti-aircraft guns, and they watched as their wingman next to them was hit and trailing black smoke toward the ground. They wrote in their diaries: Today we flew three more sorties, and Brenner's machine gun jammed twice. They are not aces. They are not heroes. They were just two young men trying to survive. This is not a story about victory. This is a story about dives, about G-forces, and about the Horns of Jericho. About four hundred flights, about four million square kilometers of Russian land. About two young people, how they went from the summer of 1939 to the spring of 1945 step by step.