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name the planes in the images. But for quite a while now a new generation has been in charge of communications, and they either don’t know or don’t care. It’s an inevitable declension: in my own time as a writer-narrator of television documentaries, few of the young researchers could understand why I got so exercised about footage of the wrong plane dropping bombs on the wrong place. Just as long as it was a plane and it was dropping bombs on something, they protested, it fitted my narrative. (They were equally puzzled when I flipped my lid at the spectacle of the wrong tanks going the wrong way in the wrong war.) And I suppose that, time having elapsed, they were bound not to see the point, just as I don’t care much whether the Roman chariots racing on screen are of the wrong type, as long as they don’t have exhaust pipes. (Strangely, Hollywood, which is famous for playing fast and loose with historical detail, was always fanatical about the authenticity of the hardware. The production design departments were hotbeds of pertinent knowledge; it wasthe dialogue that was anachronistic, and no studio mogul ever cared as long as the scene played well.) Apropos, the paper cover of Sebald’s little book about how the Germans have never known enough about the air war against the Reich carries a photograph that suggests he never knew enough about it either. If he okayed the cover picture, he okayed the wrong thing. The twin-engine planes flying low over the burned-out Reichstag are not American or British bombers. Almost certainly they are Russian, finally showing up over Berlin in the very last hours of the war. (Anyone familiar with that particular image knows that if you pull back a bit, there is a Russian tank in the foreground.) The Russian air force, mainly a tactical weapon to be used over the battleground, wasn’t really part of the Allied air attack on Germany that Sebald talks about. But the publisher’s art department was full of young people who didn’t know the difference between one aircraft and another, and I suppose we should be glad that the day will come when hardly anybody knows, except the kind of machine buff who could equally be compiling a picture book about the history of customized motorcycles in California.

Phantom Flying Saucer
    IF A BOOK CONTAINS hard facts about World War II, I find it hard to toss it aside even when the author inadvertently makes clear that he has fallen for a journalistic myth. I’m too scared of missing something vital. In Last Days of the Reich , James Lucas tells the awful story, not often enough told, of the atrocities that went on after the war was over. In some of the countries which had come under the control of the Soviet Union, or else of the Communist partisans, the locals strove to show any German civilians they could catch that the behavior of the Wehrmacht and the SS in Russia could have its counterpart in central Europe now that the tables had been turned. Hounded to death by the thousands, the victims were innocent civilians; but the victors were working on the principle that nobody was an innocent civilian. James Lucas, who died in 2002, was the author of a whole row of secondary booksabout various aspects of the war: the kind of book that is useful but not really essential. His Last Days of the Reich , however, would come close to being essential if it did not demonstrate at one point that the author can’t tell a fact from a myth. He reports that the German aircraft industry, in its last phase before it ran out of petrol, developed a flying saucer that flew at eighteen hundred miles an hour. Connoisseurs of sensationalist rubbish will have met this German flying saucer before. In Brighter than a Thousand Suns , Robert Jungk’s international best seller of 1970, the German flying saucer put in an appearance as if Jungk knew all about it. Excited journalists had to be told by aviation experts that if the Germans had developed a high-speed saucer, then it