The Wild Blue: The Men And Boys Who Flew The B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
The place you read Stephen Ambrose's new book, The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew The B-24s Over Germany, is on an airplane, a comfortable passenger jet, say, a Delta 737, built with care and precision by the Boeing folks in their picturesque facility in Seattle. the kind that has the little button that lets you recline your seat, and room for flight attendants to wander up and down the aisles bringing Dr Pepper and orange juice from frozen concentrate and the other wondrous beverages of the American century, and a little knob that blows cool, pressurized air in your face. You put down the bag of peanuts and the in-flight magazine (the kind that shamelessly touts Buffalo, New York, of all places, as a tourist attraction) and begin reading about the gathering of young men from across the country to remote locations like Liberal, Kansas and Carbondale, Illinois and Pampa, Texas to learn how to fly and beat Nazi Germany into a smoldering pancake. You read the first line of the prologue; "The B-24 was built like a 1930s Mack truck, except that it had an aluminum skin that could be cut with a knife." The 737 has a stout metal hull; as you always do, you tapped nervously on it as you walked from the jetway into the cabin. And the B-24 "Liberator" was not heated, you read, and astonishingly uncomfortable enough to make even the most ambitious masochist decline a checkride, enough to make even the most dedicated Naderite consumer advocate to admit that, maybe, waiting an hour on the tarmac at the Detroit airport for a Northwestern crew to de-ice a plane is not the worst confinement since they closed Alcatraz. Somebody (one of the New Journalists, you don't recall his name exactly, the fellow who wears the white suits) wrote that a pilot making a test flight of a new fighter plane had more chances to die in one takeoff than his wife and children could fantasize in their worst nightmares, but that doesn't tell the half of it. First off, the B-24 was a huge airplane, the biggest airplane in the Army Air Force, thirty-two thousand pounds of aluminum and wiring and guts, hard to steer, difficult enough to fly under the best of conditions, built by the lowest bidder, naturally. (One of the contractors of the B-24 is good old North American Aviation in Grand Prairie, Texas.) You take off from an airstrip in Italy that wouldn't pass muster with the FAA today, your plane loaded with tons of gasoline and bombs, not to mention the crewmen, your special responsibility. You careen down the runway, hoping that this flying boxcar, this... this beast (there's no other word for it!) can manage to rouse its shuddering engines, lift itself into the air and not end up a smoking, smoldering crater at the end of the runway. And then once aloft, you circle around the airfield, getting into a formation so closely packed that one mistake or mechanical failure in your wingman's plane could cause you to crash, through no fault of your own (although you will still be just as dead). And this may be the least dangerous thing you do all day! Your orders are simple enough in theory but damned difficult in execution; fly across the Alps to the heart of Greater Germany (in daylight!) to a ball-bearing plant or oil refinery or other important target, open your bomb bay doors, drop your stick of bombs, and return to base. Of course, it goes without saying that there aren't so many such targets, and those that are there are well-defended, and that the Germans have good enough intelligence so that they can practically read your orders before you do, and that even a teenaged reservist can learn how to fire an 88-millimeter antiaircraft gun into the air, producing those black cotton balls with red fiery hearts that can gash the fragile skin of your plane in ways you hadn't even thought about. And even though your target this time is a German fighter plane plant, and even though such raids have been enormously successful in capturing the sky over Europe for the Allies, one up-close encounter with a Messerschmidt fighter is enough to put a serious dent in your social calendar, maybe for good. Is your parachute operating? If one of those malevolent pieces of flak pierces the skin of your Liberator in just the right way, you may need it. (Your ball turret gunner isn't even wearing one, it won't fit in that space that's small and cramped even by B-24 standards; he'll have to get the waist gunner to help him out before he can put on his parachute.) If the plane is shot up so bad that you have to bail out, can you make it to Switzerland? Or behind the partisan lines in Yugoslavia? Or are you looking at a long vacation as a guest of the Luftwaffe? (Compare that thought, if you can, to the thought of Delta redirecting your luggage from Atlanta to Austin.) And let's suppose you do make it to the target without freezing to death or some other ignominious end, and drop your bombs, hoping that the pattern is right and you're not dropping death and destruction on a school or POW camp, and that all the bombs do manage to make it off the rack (trying not to think of what happens if one gets stuck), and you still have to steer this... beast! home and back over the Alps, every muscle sore, every bone weary, hopefully with enough gas to make it back to base, and land the damned thing, stick it on the runway, hoping that there's enough runway and you're not coming in too heavy and that the engines will hold up and hey, that mountain's not supposed to be there! And if, surviving all the dangers, completing the mission, landing the plane, checking to see that all your crew are safe and well, and you go back to the Spartan tent and latrines and Spam and check to see that everyone else made it back alive, that there weren't any casualties on this run, you slip off into sleep, and wake up the next morning ready and prepared to do it all again, thirty-five times (up from twenty-five!) until you can rotate home... well! Who then has the uncritical willingness to face danger! Who then is walking the sanctified precincts of (you've said it now) the Holy Ziggurat of Flight! Who then are the authentic members of the True Brotherhood!!!! If these men, the 741st Squadron of the 455th Bomb Group of the Fifteenth Air Force, are not the true heirs of Orville and Wilbur Wright, are not exemplars of heroism, are not the forbearers of what a later generation (knowing only that it existed, and that it was holy, but not knowing what to call it, exactly, because it was never spoken of) would name the Right Stuff, then nobody ever had it. It says something (not everything, but a lot) to say that Stephen Ambrose does for the men of the B-24s in The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew The B-24s Over Germany what Tom Wolfe did for the Mercury astronauts in The Right Stuff. In an age without heroes or battles (or, as a cynic might be tempted to say, without honor itself), it is only fitting and proper that we turn to the stories of those who came before. Ambrose has been an exemplar in telling these stories of WWII, and The Wild Blue is another stellar achievement in narrative history in a long line of such achievements. The focus wanders a bit throughout the history, as Ambrose introduces us to auxiliary characters here and there who have stories that were too good to leave out. (Ambrose relies heavily on oral history from WWII veterans, and later generations of scholars will no doubt be grateful for his work in collecting these oral histories.) Most of the time, though, the focus is where it should be, on the crew of the Dakota Queen, a B-24 Liberator piloted by Lieutenant George McGovern. (Yes, that George McGovern, and all of my fellow conservative partisans can put your cudgels down for a few hours to read this.) The Wild Blue manages three important tasks while preserving the characteristic clarity of Ambrose's works. First, it's a detailed story, going in-depth about the armaments of the B-24 and the nuances of Allied strategy and the hardships of bomber combat. Second, it's an analytical story, with Ambrose turning his high-powered perception on the issues of target selection and combat psychology. Most importantly, it is a deeply personal book, capturing the best and most important memories from McGovern and his crew, telling stories ranging from the comic to the heartbreaking. On top of all of this, Ambrose seems to have taken his experience in Hollywood (with Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, among others) and used it to create a dramatic overlay for The Wild Blue; you almost get the feeling that William Goldman could turn the whole thing into a screenplay while sitting by the pool. The only thing that could mar The Wild Blue is an overly partisan hero-worship on the part of Ambrose towards McGovern; Ambrose even admits that he wanted to write this book because of his longtime friendship and support of the South Dakota Senator and 1972 presidential candidate. And the hero-worship is there, in no small measure. The genius of the book, however, is such that one cannot finish it without the knowledge that any hero-worship of George McGovern or the crew of the Dakota Queen and those brave men, living and dead, who flew the Liberator in the skies over Europe has been permanently and irrevocably earned.
Stephen Ambrose has written another amazing book about men flying B-24 planes during WWII, giving the reader an action filled book. The Wild Blue follows the men who gave their lives to protect their country by flying over enemy lines. McGovern always keeps his crew members alive and does not let them down. He always keeps everything in check. He never is in a tight spot. McGovern signed up to be a fighter pilot when he was 19 years old. When he went into training he was traded over to be a b-24 pilot. When he finished with school he went to the airbase and saw the plane he was going to fly. He has been hearing about men being killed while flying their B-24s. After he finished with training he met with his crew and was waiting for his first mission to fly out. When he got word about his first mission he told his crew to check all the weapons and bomb bay doors. He got his plane over their target in Europe and they met little flack. He was an amazing pilot who always got his men out of harm when they went out on missions. McGovern came close to being shot out of the air but he knew how to keep his men alive. He witnessed his fellow pilots being shot out of the sky and he always remembered them. He had an amazing crew who always puts their lives in danger. McGovern saw action in his tour and he only had a few more flights till he could go see his wife again. When he went out on his last mission he make sure everything is in check and that nothing is broken or has plenty of gas and hydraulic liquid so when they need to land they can have the wheels ready. Anyone who wants to be in the air force can learn from the wild blue because it gives reports about what the men had to face when they were in war. If anyone wants action filled adventure then they should this book because this book has jet fights bombs going off and tons more. This book will take the breath away from readers when they read this book. The novel gives you the action like your in the plane with McGovern and his faithful crew that stayed with him through the whole thing. The reader will love this book because it just gives awesome facts and events that happen when McGovern was serving for his country.
What do You think about The Wild Blue: The Men And Boys Who Flew The B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 (2001)?
One of the last books of the summer (2014) I had to interrupt for grad school reading; I finally got to pick it up again and finish it up on my flight back from Boston to southern California. Ambrose is quite the story-teller and this is quite the story. The two combine for an enjoyable read about the rapid creation-expansion of the Army's Air Force in the 1940s and the subsequent Italy-based bomber missions taken by the AAF in an effort to cripple the production capacities of Germany during WWII. Following the future1972 presidential candidate McGovern's recruitment, crew, and piloting experience. Sometimes it is easy to think of flying planes as a relatively "cushy" job with respect to combat. But this account will have you think twice. Most WWII planes were virtually flying aluminum cans: they were thin, vulnerable, and uncomfortable. Not only could flak easily pass through the plane entirely like a knife through warm butter, but the interior temperature was often below freezing (in fact, many soldiers had their clothes frozen to their skins post-missions). Furthermore, missions were long and exhausting: often lasting over 10 hours. Pilots flying their first missions commonly had to be lifted out of their seats and off their planes after landing back at base. The left-arms of the pilots and co-pilots were grossly larger than their right-arms which weren't always holding the yoke of the plane in steady formation. Flying B-24s was a Herculean endeavor if not a miraculous one. These men were really boys asked to be men. They were asked to do new things: to make the formerly impossible possible. They were scared but they did it anyways. I have a whole mountain of respect for the B-24 crews and their efforts to end the war. There were of course sad stories of loss and hate--war is truly when humanity is at its worst--but there were also shining moments of compassion and love. The story at the end of the Epilogue made my eyes moisten. It is so nice to hear about people doing good things amidst the worst of scenarios.
—Samuel
I have enjoyed much of Ambrose's writing in past years, but this book really is an embarrassment. When I began reading THE WILD BLUE, I thought that I was reading a history of American bomber pilots flying the B-24 (Oft-forgotten in light of the B-17). It turns out that this book is really a work on the war memories of Ambrose's old friend, George McGovern who flew missions from Italy when the Air War in Europe had already been decided (For example, McGovern never once had to contend with German fighters as the Luftwaffe had already been crushed by the time he began his tour). Honestly, the book at times begins to read more like hagiography than history. Again and again, George McGovern is shown to be the epitome of the American air warrior. The book should have actually been titled "THE WILD BLUE: A GIFT TO THE POLITICIAN WITH WHOM I HAVE SCHMOOZED FOR THE LAST THIRTY YEARS" but I am guessing that would have limited the book's sales. The book is chock-full of repetition, dense statistics, and an alarming number of grammatical mistakes that call into question whether the book was ever edited before it was hurriedly rushed to the presses to take advantage of Ambrose's popularity in the early 2000s. However, despite the efforts of its author, the book does in part tell the story of some of the bravest men the US has ever produced. The scale of the training program initiated after the war began as well as the courage and professionalism of the bomber crews themselves are astounding. Read on these great men, but read of them in a different book.
—Nicolas
A very informative book about the origin, development and implementation of the strategic bombing campaign undertaken by the US heavy bombers during World War II. This book focuses primarily on the B-24 "Liberator" rather than the B-17 "Flying Fortress." The book centers upon the flying career of George McGovern, a 22 year old pilot of the B-24 bomber in November, 1944 when his crew was assigned to the European theater. He later became a US Senator during the 1960s and Presidential candiate in the 1972 election. Stationed at an air force base in Italy, McGovern piloted his aircraft and crew over the Alps and into Axis Europe on bombing runs from November, 1944 through April, 1945. He finished with 35 missions (the required number before concluding a tour and returning home) which he accomplised just prior to Germany's surrender in May, 1945. He was considered to be an excellent pilot by his crew and other airmen. In the book, Ambrose details the capabilities and limitations of the B-24, the type of missions it flew, its biggest enemies (bad weather and enemy flack) and many tragedies suffered by the brave men who flew and manned this lethal plane during the second world war. It was a stirring book and a good read.
—Craig
