RogerBW's Blog

1993 historical aviation fiction. For a few months in 1916 Linienschiffsleutnant Otto Prohaska of the Austro-Hungarian Navy is a heroic aviator.

The švejkárna, systematic military incompetence, is strong here; perhaps too strong, with several supporting characters essentially being reduced to stereotype. Have a detestable commander by all means, it's part of the genre, but have him do at least one thing that couldn't be summed up in a one-sentence character description. Have a convert to German nationalism, but don't have him spout specifically Nazi ideology and foretell the rise of a Hitler-style figure in too-accurate detail; it makes it too obvious that you're writing in the 1990s and not the 1910s.

This is also a very grim book, with occasional amusing moments but on balance focusing on the grinding destructive pointlessness of war—with a coda as Prohaska talks to a WWI aviation enthusiast many years later. Prohaska gets assigned to the Italian front (oh, hello, Luigi Cadorna), arguably one of the worst fronts of the war, and even from a few thousand metres up it's not much fun.

The book is good, but definitely takes a darker turn compared with the earlier ones; it's not that the subject matter has changed, but there are fewer amusing incidents and intervals in between the depressing routine. (There are more flashes foward to Prohaska's career after the War, though as I understand it the fourth and final volume of the series deals with his days as a cadet.)