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Along with detailed discussions of technical questions, the visible aesthetic accompanying individual soldiers’ destructive prowess was perhaps the most central theme of German airmen’s conversations.

Interlocutors told stories of attacks and successful kills in the greatest possible detail and vividness of language:

Once we bombed a station at FOLKESTONE just as a long passenger train was drawing out; down went the bomb right on to the train—oh boy! (Laughter.) Then alongside DEAL station there was a huge shed we bombed that, and I never saw anything like the flame that shot up—there was a terrific explosion. There must have been some highly inflammable stuff in the warehouse. Great bits flew up into the air before us, higher than we were flying ourselves.¹⁰⁵

This is war as witnessed from above, from the perspective of bomber crews and, in particular, fighter pilots. War looks very different from the ground, where the destruction is actually taking place, where people are running, fleeing, and dying. The German Luftwaffe also suffered significant casualties, more than 1,700 from August 1, 1940, to March 31, 1941,¹⁰⁶ but that contributed to the sporting character of airmen’s missions and their aesthetic experience of destruction.

Risk was an essential part of war, and it took particular skill and control over one’s machinery if one was to have any hope of surviving: