My Escape From Donington Hall, Preceded By An Account Of The Siege Of Kiao-Chow In 1915

Einfach geschrieben, aber eine spannende und wahre Geschichte

The rather mundane title was supplied by the English publisher. The 1916 German title was THE ADVENTURES OF THE FLIER OF TSING TAO - My Experiences in Three Continents. The 1915 date in the title of the English edition is wrong as the seige of Tsing Tao occurred in 1914. Pluschow was an Imperial German naval aviator who flew the only German airplane during the seige and bombardment by the Japanese and a token British force. Flying reconnaissance missions and dropping homemade bombs, Pluschow was the only German aviator to claim a kill of a Japanese airplane. He relates that he shot it down with 30 rounds from his parabellum pistol. Ordered to fly out of Tsing Tao before the final Japanese attack, he flew to China where he avoided internment by slipping aboard a ship bound for the U.S. Attempting to reach Germany, he was captured by the British and became the only German POW to escape and return to Germany. He nearly circumnavigated the globe in returning home. This is a lucid account of Pluschow's adventures and one of the few English language accounts of the fighting at Tsing Tao. The book was published during the war and contains several unflattering references to the Japanese as monkeys. This is in keeping with German anti-Japanese propaganda of the time. I have a WW1 German medallion depicting a British uniformed man sending a Japanese uniformed monkey up a tree after the German eagle. Two additional books on this subject are GUNTHER PLUSCHOW: AIRMAN, ESCAPER & EXPLORER by Anton Rippon and DRAGON MASTER by Robert Whittaker. Both available from Amazon. This review is from the Kindle e-book, March 26, 2011, with the pale green cover and a black sunburst. It is a bargain at $1.99.

Very nice read, though it seems a bit abbreviated in spots; I can't help but wonder if anything was cut in translation. The story is good, though the author could have used an editor to assist in expanding several parts. I recommend this to anyone with a taste for history or even just interesting personal stories.