Customer Reviews

Heaven Next Stop: A Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot at War

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Mr. Bloemertz writes in a boring style, adds almost nothing to the loyal reader of fighter-aviation books, and adds much less about his personal drama, because the characters are "empty"... (when they have at least a name, which is very seldom!)About tactics and technical details, forget about it. They simply don't exist in this book.

This book by Mr. Bloemertz has one characteristic the books about WW II written soon after the war generally have: it lacks research. The writer never ever say the complete name of the characters (his Squadron Leader, etc), only give us a few first names (like "Robert" ou "Werner"). Even his Squadron number is not told to the reader.Not one single date of events is given in the entire book! The weakest point is when he says his friend Werner shot down a RAF Spitifire over France, and the pilot was captured, and he says he wore the Victoria Cross. Well, only one RAF fighter pilot won this decoration in WW II, and he was Flight Lieutnant James Nicholson in the Battle of Britain. And Nicholson never was shot down over France, nor been taken prisoner!!!

Mr. BLoemertz (or his editors, I don't know) out together a terrible book, with no data, no sequence of events, which makes it one of the worst first-accounts WW II books I ever read! It seems like all is fake (although Bloemertz really served in JG 26). I don't recomend it to anyone.

As an avid reader of german WWII Autobiographies I was disappointed in the lack of specifics reagrding names, places, equipment and battles but found the book very good reading regarding the human tradegy that is the Luftwaffe's destruction. I'd recommend this book for leisurely reading but don't compare it to Stuka Pilot, I flew For the Fuhrer, etc..

I was very disappointed in this book. I'm the kind of person who loves flying so much I can enjoy reading old airline timetables, but this book was terrible. There's a complete lack of detail that would make the book interesting; it's as if the book were a letter home to a loved one from whom the author was hiding detail for the sake of national security. Each chapter starts with a jolt as there's no linkage to the previous material; nothing like, "Through the summer the allies did .. and then in August we ...". It's as if 15 chapters were taken at random from a much longer book. The lack of detail is terrible, there's no information about the aircraft used, no sense of a sequence of missions occuring in time, no details of any particular flight that would make it seem real. None of the ground crew is mentioned, as if the ony people involved were the pilots. New people do show up with no introduction, then are never heard of again. The writing style is very hyperbolic and tedious to read. One big complaint is the brevity of the book - it has 150 pages but the type face is very big; if it were printed like a Penguin, it would only take 50 or 60 pages, so it's actually very expensive. There are other books, written by historians and/or pilots which much better convey the air war of WW2.

simply put, the worst air combat narrative I've ever read. It lacks facts, it lacks characters,... enough! Even remembering its flaws to write this review makes me angry!!!

Wow tough crowd.I bought my copy off e bay for $20 ...got it yesterday in the mail and could not put it down.While it does not have a lot of technical info ,dates ,names etc I found it to be an exciting personal account of the final year of airwar over the Western front.I reccomend it to anyone interested in first person German Memoirs.

I just finished this book, having borrowed it from my school library. I was pretty well annoyed at the resonses of some of the other, short-sighted reviews to be found here and felt compelled to tell you the truth. In short, this is a very good, honest book detailing the experiences of "another face in the croud", if you will. Bloemertz was a German fighter pilot who risked his life on a daily basis flying for what he believed in... the protection of his homeland. He was not an idealist by any means. He only did his best to try and stem the tide of bombers raining death and ruin upon his country. No, this book isn't the best written piece of literature... rather it reads like a diary. The words are true, heartfelt, and honest. Although some of the previous reviewers seem to expect every author to be Tolkien or Hemmingway, this book is very well written considering the fact that Bloemertz was an ordinary man trapped in extraordinary circumstances. I hope that you'll read it, lest the truth of human suffering be forgotten.

What went on in the minds of those teen-agers and young men who took to their fighters and tried to stop the aerial juggernaught that was the eighth air force and the RAF? Translated to English in the fifties, "Heaven Next Stop" offers us a valuable insight. Thousands upon thousands of young German Luftwaffe pilots were shot down in their fighters on the Western front. Few survived the war, and even fewer of those were accomplished aces. "Heaven Next Stop" is the story of one of those faceless thousands of young men who made up the 90% of the German Fighter Force - men who rarely scored in combat, and had enough trouble just surviving their encounters with Allied aircraft.

If you are looking for a detailed history about an "ace", full of pertinent unit and pilot data, this is not it. This is a young man's overall impressions on his wartime experiences, at times more concerned with his personal life and relationships with his friends than with statistics and his combat performance. Bloemertz despairs as his comrades disappear from the squadron almost daily, and his countrymen are obliterated in their cities; all victims of the constant grind of aerial combat at the hands of the ever-increasing Allied formations.

If you've read your share of WW2 Pilot memoirs I think you'll find this book both interesting and refreshing, portraying almost a bystander's view of a front-line Luftwaffe unit on the Western Front.

Simply put, Heaven Next Stop is a farse. Sold as a "a real tale about a German fighter pilot in World War II", it is not !! The book gives no names , no squadron number, no date, no data, no technical details. We got only a few first names, that's all. If that was not enough, the writer is really bad, he can't write ...!