Book Reviews
Go To Hopkins & Company Homepage	Go to Executive Times Archives Go to Book Review List
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany by Stephen E. Ambrose Recommendation: •••
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
Ride On If you’ve seen Band of Brothers, and have read everything else Stephen Ambrose has written, then it’s time to pick up his latest book, The Wild Blue. In many ways, this is Ambrose at his very best. He takes a central figure, in this case former Senator George McGovern, and tracks his time as a bomber pilot flying a B-24 in World War II. McGovern’s real story and that of his crew and other pilots provides a backdrop for Ambrose to tell the story of one small part of a great war in a way that makes it come alive for current readers. Here’s an excerpt: “December 16 was a cloudy, cold day all across Europe, nut the 741^st and the rest of the Fifteenth Air Force flew anyway. It was the day the Germans took advantage of the weather to counterattack in the Ardennes, launching the Battle of the Bulge. The target for McGovern and the others was the oil refineries in Brux, Czechoslovakia. One B-24 broke its landing gear on takeoff. It jettisoned its bombs in the Adriatic, then crash-landed at the Gioia, Italy, airfield. Another bomber had engine trouble and had to return to Cerignola. McGovern got the Dakota Queen into formation in a broken cloud cover, but ‘all of a sudden everything just goes blank.’ The formation had flown into complete cloud cover. McGovern held his position, number three, but when they got above the clouds he discovered that they were flying at the same altitude but the plane that was number two had crossed him and was on his left side. ‘I was just petrified with fear at the sight.’ The lead pilot saw the situation and called on his radio. ‘What’s going on here?’ McGovern motioned to the other pilot that he should go up while the Dakota Queen went down, and they crossed again until they got into their proper position. ‘That’s as close as I ever came to being killed and getting my crew killed and losing our bomber,’ McGovern said. He was shaking with fear and the ‘knowledge of how little control we had over our fate when the weather took over. There was nothing you could do when you flew into a cloud except pray because you couldn’t see anything.’” To get a sense of what to expect in reading about these airmen, here are some statistics: “The group had started 1945 with sixty Liberators. In the next our months it had flown 1,434 sorties. In that period it lost eight B-24s to flak and another thirty-four received flak damage. A total of seventy-four crewmen were missing in action, plus twenty wounded and sixteen killed. In its fifteen months in action, the group had flow enough miles on combat missions to circle the earth over ten times with a thirty-plane formation. It had flown altogether a total of 252 combat missions, lost 118 liberators. It had suffered nearly 1,000 casualties – men killed in action, wounded, missing, or taken prisoner.” Ambrose writes history in a way that makes readers understand the issues, the action and the emotion. Enjoy reading The Wild Blue. Steve Hopkins, September 19, 2001
ã 2001 Hopkins and Company, LLC