Poet Flyer by E. John Knapp, a Review

 

E. John Knapp’s Poet Flyer surprised me. The beginning of the story is routine and predictable as a war memoir. Whirlwind love. Whirlwind training. Go to war on arrival in England. On the surface it looks modest: a slim volume of poems written by a former B-17 navigator, telling the story of his life in verse. Then with no warning, tragedy rips through Knapp's life.  From that fatal day forward the book becomes an account of survival. Not survival in the cinematic sense, but the quieter, lonelier kind—the survival of the man who lived while his crew did not.

Knapp does not frame his story as a war epic. He begins with training, with the formation of a ten-man bomber crew that becomes, by necessity, a family. Anyone who has served in a tightly knit unit will recognize the texture of those early pages the way shared danger forges intimacy faster than time ever could. Knapp makes us feel how completely his identity became bound up with theirs.

The central tragedy of the book is brutally simple. Knapp is grounded for a mission. The crew flies without him. Their aircraft is shot down after returning over the target—a fatal decision by the mission leader. Other crews see three parachutes. Six men, at least, are dead. Knapp survives because of an accident of paperwork and timing. 

What makes Poet Flyer extraordinary is how Knapp refuses to soften that fact. There is no melodrama, no attempt to turn the event into a lesson. Instead, the poems circle it again and again, the way a mind circles a trauma it can never resolve. He writes about guilt not as a single emotion but as a permanent companion, one that walks beside marriage, fatherhood, career, and old age. The war ends. His life goes on. But his empty seat in the bomber never disappears.

And yet this is not a book of despair. One of Knapp’s great achievements is to show how a person can carry unbearable knowledge and still live fully. He comes home to his wife. They raise children. He works. He loves. But always, somewhere in the background, there is the image of a burning aircraft and three white blossoms of parachute silk. The happiness is real—and so is the haunting.

The choice to tell this story in verse is crucial. Prose would have invited explanation and narrative smoothing. Poetry allows Knapp to write the way memory actually works: in flashes, fragments, images that refuse to be put in order. His language is plain. He writes like a man trained to calculate courses and distances, now measuring the space between what happened and what should have happened.

Poet Flyer is a war story that does not pretend war ends when the shooting stops. It is about survivor’s guilt—but also about moral luck, about the terrifying truth that who lives and who dies is often decided by chance.

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A particularly painful aspect of the story for me is how John lost his comrades.  My uncle Jack was on active duty with the U.S. Air Force from 1958-1978. He was a navigator on a KC-97 tanker plane in 1963.  He was on stand down to get married.  Just before his wedding his entire crew was killed in a midair explosion. I was 10 years old and attended the wedding with my family. I can vaguely remember a very somber event.  Jack did three full-year tours in Vietnam and three shorter tours after that tragic event.  

Sachsenhausen Nazi Death Camp.

Sachsenhausen occupies a grim but central place in the Nazi camp system. Located just north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, it was established in 1936 as a model concentration camp—designed not only to imprison enemies of the regime but to demonstrate how the entire terror apparatus was meant to function. Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sachsenhausen was not primarily built as a mass extermination center, but it became a central node in the machinery of murder, forced labor, and bureaucratic control that made the Holocaust possible.

Because of its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen took on a special role. It housed many political prisoners, resistance figures, and high-profile detainees, including German dissidents, foreign politicians, clergy, and later Allied prisoners of war. Just as important, it was the administrative and training hub for the SS-run camp system. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was headquartered nearby, and Sachsenhausen became the place where guards were trained and procedures standardized. What was learned here—how to break prisoners, how to organize forced labor, how to manage mass death—was exported to camps across occupied Europe.

Sachsenhausen was also a killing site in its own right. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and execution. In 1941, the camp was used to murder at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, many shot in a specially constructed execution facility known as Station Z. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “undesirable” were imprisoned and killed here. While it did not have the industrialized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen had gas vans, shooting installations, and crematoria designed to process bodies efficiently.

The camp’s layout itself reflected Nazi ideology. Prisoners’ barracks were arranged in a fan shape around a central parade ground, allowing guards in a single watchtower to survey the entire compound. This was not accidental. Sachsenhausen was built as a demonstration of how surveillance, discipline, and terror could be made architectural. The prisoner was never meant to escape being seen—or being controlled.

Sachsenhausen’s role in the broader death-camp system was therefore structural as well as lethal. If Auschwitz was the industrial heart of genocide, Sachsenhausen was part of its brain. Procedures for registration, punishment, labor deployment, and extermination were refined here before being implemented elsewhere. The men who ran Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz often trained in or passed through Sachsenhausen.

When Allied forces closed in during 1945, tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced on death marches westward; many died along the roads. Those left behind were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. The site later became a Soviet special camp, where thousands more prisoners died, adding another tragic layer to its history.

Sachsenhausen is the place where bureaucratic murder was organized, tested, and perfected—a reminder that genocide does not begin with gas chambers, but with offices, training programs, and men who learn how to make cruelty efficient.