NASM copy purchased with funds from the S. Dillon Ripley Endowment.
Contents:
"It couldn't be much worse" -- "That made him very happy" -- "The enemy was taken completely by surprise" -- " The squadron was attacked" -- "The pilots did not appear eager" -- "I turned back to pick him up" -- "We think we destroyed the mission" -- "Many strange faces" -- "I hate to see them go" -- "Torn to death" -- "Love to all and write real often" -- "A perfect swan dive" -- "It's all for the best, dad" -- "We seemed to be awfully high" -- "He was even more handsome in his uniform" -- "Jap fighters making long range passes" -- "I inflated my Mae West" -- "I jerked and ducked instinctively" -- He also flew missions with several other crews" -- "Well, I'm done for"
Summary:
Historian and aviator Jay Stout follows up his spellbinding account of the U.S. 303rd Bomb GroupHells Angelswith the equally remarkable story of the Air Apaches in the Pacific. Air Apaches reconstructs the war of the 345th Bomb Group in impressively painstaking detail, capturing what it was like to be one of the young men flying low-level bombing and strafing missions and if the missions werent dangerous enoughfacing such challenges as kamikaze attacks and, if a pilot was shot down, primitive jungle conditions and a sword-brandishing enemy who did not treat downed airmen by the letter of the Geneva Convention. Air Apaches is more than the story of one unit in aerial combat in World War II. It is the story of men at war across all of history.
