McGuire had always wanted to be a pilot. Because he didn't qualify, he was assigned to be the waist gunner of a B-17. He was sent to Amendola in 1944 to become part of the 2nd Bomber Group. The casualty rate among aircrews was exceedingly high. The day his replacement aircraft arrived the crew's first duty was to clean out and inventory the possessions of those who had not returned from the previous raid. An entire squadron had been wiped out.The book is filled with pictures and copies of actual battle reports and eyewitness accounts of events, all of which contribute to extraordinary verisimilitude. For example, McGuire obtained some rare pictures taken by a fourteen-year-old Czechoslovakian who witnessed the carnage in the sky during one raid over Yugoslavia. He took pictures of the German troops examining the wreckage of numerous airplanes on the ground. He later became a historian and donated the photographs to the museum of the 2nd Bomber Group. The Czechs were anti-Nazi for the most part and went out of their way to collect and decently bury dead American flyers. The author discovered a placard still standing in 1983 that commemorated the sport where one B-17 crashed. It had inscribed the names of the crew ta ken from their dog tags.
Take-off could be as scary as the bomb runs themselves; The bombers were lined up literally nose to tail with only a few inches between them. Just one mistake or a broken hydraulic line and an enormous pileup might result. The planes were always grossly overloaded and it seemed to McGuire they would never get off the ground. Sometimes they didn't.
After several missions, some harrowing, some just milk runs, the crew became confident in its ability to function well together and not to question their ultimate survival. The raid on Debreczen challenged that assumption. For many of the crew, the night before the raid was to be the last nightmare-free sleep they were to have. The weather was appalling that day. They took off virtually blind and, unbeknownst to them, the raid was called off. All the groups except theirs heard the recall. Instead of a sky filled with bombers in a defensive formation, there were only 26 planes. Flak over the target was extremely accurate and intense. They were soon flying through the debris shot off of airplanes preceding them in formation.
Every plane was hit repeatedly. Many had engines damaged. One plane that miraculously made it back suffered a direct hit in the waist and the tail remained connected to the rest of the plane virtually only by the cables and lines running through the fuselage. It was following this raid that the author realized how vulnerable they were and the "dread" set in.
Dread was a realistic assessment. The Eighth Air Force, headquartered in Britain, had set a limit of twenty-five missions for its pilots. It had been the practice to fly them until they were shot down or killed and men had become so exhausted they were simply refusing to fly any more. Hence the American recommendation to set a limit on the number of missions before being rotated home. The Fifteenth Air Force, headquartered in Italy, that McGuire flew for set a limit of fifty missions. Four to six percent losses per mission were considered acceptable, but they discovered out of channels that in July of 1944 the Fifteenth had lost 318 bombers out of a total of 1,900. Twenty-five missions times four percent did not make the odds look good. Fifty missions made the odds look really bad. By the seventeenth mission, no one figured on making it home. They all developed twitches and body tics (McGuire still suffers from occasional twitching). Others developed bizarre behavior and almost all of them began "pulling missions," i.e., reliving missions during nightmares.
McGuire's description of the reunion with the surviving crewmen in 1992 is very touching. Indeed, this is one of the best military memoirs I had read. It's honest, descriptive, vividly written and loaded with detail and anecdotes not found in the traditional military histories.
A review of casualties in B-17's staggers the mind. The 8th Air Force flying out of Britain lost 4,754 B-17's and 2,112 B-24's and 44,472 aircrew. British losses were even greater. They lost 4,724 B-17's and 55, 573 aircrew.
According to a history of Boeing aircraft, during the peak of its production, the company was turning out 364 bombers per month.
See [b:A Real Good War|4094306|A Real Good War (Cassell Military Paperbacks)|Sam Halpert|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41CMHNDCK4L._SL75_.jpg|4141454] for a fictional account.
