Found I Book I've Sought For Many Years

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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The book in question is (English title) Rocket Fighter by Mano Ziegler. It’s about the Messerschmitt 163, a liquid-fuel rocket powered delta wing fighter plane from 1941, a.k.a “The Komet”.

There were some problems with it, like it was too fast, the rocket motor propelling it wasn’t really adjustable, being either “on” or “off” with no in between and propelling the thing to 600+ mph (1000+ kph), which meant it overtook the Allied fighters rather quickly (to say the least), the fuel supply was limited, meaning after 2-3 minutes (yes, two to three minutes) past take-off it turned into a delta wing glider traveling at better than 500 mph. It could attain 40,000 feet, but was entirely unpressurized, which was potentially fatal to the pilot The two varieties of liquid used to fuel it were horribly corrosive and reactive, prone to explosions. The corrosion bit was pretty gross - several pilots were dissolved alive when the fuel tanks sprang leaks. In fact, if my information is correct, the fatality rate among Komet pilots was even higher than among U-boat crews - which was already appalling.

Yes, I have some rather morbid interests. If you think about it, Das Boot was pretty icky in parts, too, and it’s from the same side of the same war.

Mano Ziegler was a Komet pilot who survived the program, and wrote a book about it. Anyhow, I heard about the Komet and the book via another book called The World’s Worst Aircraft by James Gilbert. Ever since I first read TWWA I’ve been looking for Rocket Fighter with no luck. Apparently the Chicago Public Library had a copy at one point but, like so many other books at the CPL, it had gone missing. It’s been… let’s see, first read it when I lived in Chicago… over five years of looking for this thing, which is out of print.

Well, found out today that there are only four libraries in the world that will admit to having a copy, and only two in North America. Here’s hoping that one of them will be kind enough to loan their copy to my local library so I can read it.

And if any of you have a copy laying about the house and are interested in parting with it, please e-mail me. Oh, wait - it has to be an English translation, as I don’t read German. But, on the off chance you do have a copy…

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Good luck in finding it! Have you tried running a search on http://www.bookfinder.com/ – who knows? Maybe it will pop up there.

I recently had the thrill of finding a book I’d been looking for for over 30 years. I wrote about it to Cafe Society on the SDMB, and got a reply with a couple of links for finding books. Maybe the first one would help you? Anyway, here’s my thread link:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=206171

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There are several copies available at Amazon. Most appear to be in English.

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You know, as soon as I posted I knew someone would come up with a link or something…

Well, now that I’ve asked to borrow the thing I’ll read it first. If it’s as good as I hope I’ll buy a copy. If it’s really good (and not too expensive) maybe I’ll buy a second copy for the library. Can’t have too many good books, right?

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And, oh yes, the really hard part of all this was finding a name and title - simply mumbling “well, there’s this book you see, it’s about the Me163 Komet and it’s written by this German guy…” doesn’t always get you what you want.

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If I recall correctly, the casualty rate of Komet pilots was around 25% fatalities per flight. (One of the interesting features of the Me163 you didn’t mention was its lack of landing gear - every landing was a crash landing and if there was any fuel left in the tanks the plane tended to explode.) For u-boat crewmen, the casualty rate was a relatively non-lethal 75% for the duration of the war.