The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 by Stephen E. Ambrose

The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 Reviews

• 
  Jason Koivu

  Slow down with that zipping and zooming about, whipper-snapper! This is a far tamer tale. Like the planes Stephen E. Ambrose is describing herein, his prose plods along at a steady, satisfying pace. These are not jet fighters, these are workhorses carrying out a task.
  
  The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45 is just as much the story of George McGovern as it is of the pilots and crews of those famous World War II bombers. McGovern is most famously known as the Democratic candidate who lost to Nixon in the 1972 election, the year the Democratic National Headquarters was raided by Republican operatives in the dead of night during a little incident you may have heard of called Watergate. Prior to that, he piloted one of these finicky, taxing aerial beasts.
  
  
  
  Ambrose wisely uses McGovern's wartime experience as a template and as the narrative thread for his treatise on the B-24, infusing a dull, non-fiction text with a human element, a technique in vogue with popular, modern day historians. The people like a good story. McGovern's life is perfectly entertaining in this context, but Ambrose heightens his book's readability by adding in the stories of other pilots and those of McGovern's flight crew. All of which turns a book about a plane into something much more humanistic. The reader can't help but develop an attachment to these courageous men.
  
  The Wild Blue is a solid niche book for those familiar with WWII, but who want to have a deeper understanding of this specific facet of the war.
• 
  Deacon Tom F

  Before I begin, it is important for everyone to know that I am a retired USAF Lt Col. So,. This was the story of those who came before me in air power.
  
  It was written in an extremely personal fashion, giving behind the scenes information about our heroes. Sharing the terror of flying through flack; giving parts of their rations to the exceptionally poor Italian civilians and the pain of losing a mate were all part of the story.
  
  May God continue to bless the remaining heroes from WWII.
• 
  Rob Kitchin

  From the back cover I thought I would be getting the story of the 741 Squadron and, in particular, the crew of the Dakota Queen. What you actually get is the story of George McGovern from early days through his training and onto the end of the Second World War. Very little time is spent with any of the other crewmen or the wider 741 Squadron. This is very much the war as experienced by McGovern and the reader joins the squadron when McGovern does in September 1944, at the tail end of the war. If you skip the author’s note, as I did, then it’s a long way into the book before we discover why the focus is on McGovern. It turns out that he ran for President in 1972 on the Democrat ticket losing in a landslide to Nixon. I was two at the time and given I live in Ireland I’m not up on my US political history. What this meant was the book was very badly imbalanced and somewhat misleading. I wanted to know the wider history of the 741 Squadron and the diverse lives and experiences of people who flew with it. What I got was McGovern and some general context. And it’s hardly non-biased stuff. As Ambrose says in the author’s note: ‘I have been a friend and supporter of George McGovern for nearly three decades’. If you want to know about McGovern’s early life then this is your book; if you want a more rounded biographical history of the air war over Europe then look elsewhere.
• 
  Eric_W

  Note that I wrote this review before the plagarism controversy. See my review of
  Wings Over Morning
  
  Ambrose became a widely popular popularizer of World War II history and he has managed to churn out several in the past few years that focus on the common soldier experience. Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 and himself a bombardier on B-24s, told Ambrose, " never had a bad officer." Ambrose was startled to hear this from the creator of Major Major Major, Colonel Cathcart, and General Dreedle, but Heller, when queried by Ambrose, simply replied they were all invention. How they became so good is part of Ambrose' story. The Army Air Corps grew from 26,000 men at the beginning of the war to 2, 400,000 by 1944. American airmen had 360 hours of flight training before entering combat compared with only 110 for the Germans. It was a hazardous business ( four planes went down during a formation flying exercise killing everyone on board, McGovern reported) as the B-24s were very difficult to fly, requiring considerable brute muscle power. Most of the men were still in their teens with only a few officers over twenty-two. Ambrose focuses on the career of George McGovern, a pilot in the 741st Bomb Squadron, based in Cerignola, Italy, who survived flying 35 missions, won several DFCs and was considered a terrific pilot by his crew. Coming from a South Dakota parsonage where airplanes were rarely seen let along flown in, McGovern had extraordinary depth perception that helped him to become such a competent pilot. The plane itself was noisy, unheated, and thin-skinned. By the time he reached Italy, German fighters were not much of a problem as the Germans were running out of fuel and P-51s, flown by the famous African-American Tuskegee squadrons, prevented German fighters from being much of a threat. Flak was another problem. Over the targets the sky would be virtually black except where the shells explosions caused red flashes. The bombers had no choice but to fly right into it, unable to shoot back, make adjustments, or react independently. On one mission, his plane returned with 160 holes, one destroyed engine, no hydraulics — consequently no flaps or brakes — and required every ounce of skill for McGovern to make a safe landing (they tied parachutes to the struts, threw them out the open waist gunner windows, and pulled the ripcords on McGovern' command to slow the plane down after touching the ground). McGovern was 22. The B-24 was manufactured by a consortium of companies that included Ford Motor and Douglas Aircraft. It was called the Liberator and was designed to drop high explosives on enemy positions well behind the front lines — and especially on Berlin. In fact, the B-24 carried a largely payload than the more well-known B-17. The Liberator earned a reputation as an difficuolt beast quite fairly, as Amborses' following description of conditions in the plane attests. "Steering the four-engined airplane was difficult and exhausting, as there was no power except the pilot's muscles. It had no windshield wipers, so the pilot had to stick his head out the side window to see during a rain...there was no heat, despite temperatures that at 20,000 feet and higher got as low as 40 or 50 degrees below zero...the seats were not padded, could not be reclined, and were cramped into so small a space that a man had almost no chance to stretch and none whatsoever to relax. Absolutely nothing was done to make it comfortable for the pilot, co-pilot, or the other eight men in the crew..."
  
  Taking off was always an adventure as even a slight drop in one of the four engine' efficiency might cause a crash since the planes were always overloaded way beyond design capacity. The planes were dangerous places to be — only 50 percent of their crews survived to the war's end. The B-24 Liberator performed better than the B-17 Flying Fortress, but it was less ergonomic and more susceptible to battle damage. They operated out of improvised fields, usually without hangars and formal barracks, surrounded by a civilian population amid ruins and on the edge of starvation There were more B-24's built than any other US airplane and Ambrose says "it would be an exaggeration to say that the B-24 won the war for the Allies. But don't ask how they could have won the war without it."
  
  
• 
  Silvana

  This is the second Ambrose's book I've read since Band of Brothers. It tells about the experiences of B-24 bomber crews in World War II; 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force, to be exact. The stories are from the beginning, i.e. the crews’ background, their vigorous training (the high requirements resulted in many “washouts”), the first mission, until when the war’s over.
  
  Thus, it’s quite an extensive piece that offers lots of interesting details. If you love aircrafts (and aerial warfare), you’ll consider this book as a classic.
  
  Ambrose fulfilled my expectation as a war historian, the story just flows with such a flair that makes you feel like want to be in that plane. B-24, or Liberator, is one of the five bombers utilized by the US Army during the war. It requires nine crew members: pilot, co-pilot, navigator/bombardier, flight engineer, radio operator, gunners (nose, waist, tail and ball turret). One can only imagine how heavy and cramped that bomber was. Over 18,000 B-24s were built, more than any other US planes. But they destroyed German refineries, marshalling yards, factories, air fields, thus destroying German’s ability to make war.
  
  The first impression I’ve got after finishing this book is that the airmen in World War II suffered less than the infantry soldiers. Yes, the plane is too cramped, they faced those devastating flaks, penetrating cold in 20,000 feet height, but still, they got to sleep in tents with real beds, not in foxholes, helplessly waiting for enemy’s shells and mortars to blast them to oblivion. The Army Air Force also applied a not-so-strict segregation between officers and enlisted men, as well as behaviors. No chickenshits (army term for jack-ass officers) in combats either; a different case with the infantry. Last but not least, as bomber crews they did not have to see the faces of enemy and civilians they killed.
  
  My favorite part of the book is the chapter telling about the P-51 (Mustang) black fighter pilots from the 99th Fighter Squadron, or known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The US Army in World War II still practiced discrimination, but those pilots did not discriminate, as admitted by the bomber crews. The P-51 pilots are honored for their bravery, discipline and dedication in their main role to protect the bombers.
  
  One must not forget that airplane is the most destructive tool in this war. Not only hundreds of thousands people (including civilians) were killed, but hundreds of historical buildings, residences, infrastructures were destroyed. However, one must not also forget that aerial warfare saved the Western civilization. We can only hope that the currently-used smart bombs can improve their accuracy.
• 
  Stephen

  This is an very well documented and well-written book about being a bomber pilot during the Second World War. George McGovern's embarrassing defeat running against Nixon gets brought up a lot, but Ambrose makes it clear that while McGovern may not have been the choice for president, he was a good pilot and soldier. Also, the description of the B-24's strengths and weaknesses I personally found interesting, as the plane is one of my favorites. Overall, very well-written and worth the time.
• 
  Roger

  My father was a plane mechanic working on B-24's in the Eighth Air Force during World War II. Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue is probably (at least for now) the closest I can get to reading about my father's wartime experiences, even though the book focuses on the "forgotten war" the Fifteenth Air Force waged out of Italy, rather than the Eighth's operations in England that my father was a part of. In the main The Wild Blue is the story of one particular B-24 pilot, George McGovern, a personal friend of Ambrose's and the 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee. However Ambrose weaves the stories of a lot of servicemen into the tapestry of this book. Ambrose is one of my go-to authors when it comes to history. He was a dedicated researcher who knew how to write so he scores very highly on the readability scale. He neither skimps on facts not does he inundate you with them, and he is not afraid to throw in the occasional bizarre tidbit. (I now know why Cheerio's cereal is called Cheerio's, for instance.) I highly recommend anything you can find by this author-so far everything I have read by him has proven interesting and informative.
• 
  Ginny Thurston

  I really loved this book because my father flew as a radio operator in a B24 out of Italy...15 th Air Force, 485th Bomb Group, 830th Squadron. My oldest son had to interview him for AP English ( thank goodness!) in 1998, or I would have never heard all his stories which are very similar to this book. My son not only transcribed the interview, but put it on tape. He told him stories that he never shared with us, but was at a point that he could. He even took us to Birmingham to see the only B24 still flying. His adventures were similar to many of the stories in The Wild Blue...crash landing on the Isle of Vis...bailing out over Yugoslavia and being rescued by Tito's men, visiting the Isle of Capri, being hit by flak and almost dying because the pilot's oxygen hose was cut. He is no longer with us, but we treasure these brave stories of the Greatest Generation.
• 
  Staci

  While the title and cover would lead one to believe The Wild Blue is about B-24s, it is more a biography about George McGovern, U.S. Senator and Presidential Candidate.
  
  It was incredibly interesting to learn details about the B-24s and the conditions that the men stationed in Italy lived in during World War II. For those interested in learning more about George McGovern there was a good deal of detail about his training for and time spent as a B-24 pilot during WWII.
• 
  Don

  I read this book many years ago and enjoyed. This time I listened to the audiobook version.
  
  Stephen Ambrose always told a good story and this one is just as good as any of his fine books.
  
  The main character in the story is George McGovern who most people recognize as the South Dakota senator who ran for president against Nixon.
  
  Whatever your politics you have to respect McGovern for the skill and dedication he brought to serving as a B-24 pilot.
• 
  Martin Koenigsberg

  This book is good enough to overcome Stephen Ambrose's usual faults. There's a little of the the "breathlessness" that often overwhelms his works, but he manages to keep his style out of the way of the material.
  
  Or maybe I was just fine with it, as I have met a few of the men who flew the B-24 Liberators over Europe, and found them to be the soft-spoken heroes that Ambrose portrays. My father was a PTO vet, and one of his business partners was a huge fellow who had flown with the 8th Air Force over Northern Europe, a brilliant gentle giant. A treasured roommate from College had a dad who had flown over Southern Europe with the 15th. So when Ambrose goes on his frothy rants about how great these guys were, in this case, I feel strong agreement. And this time he's less frothy, and more on point.
  
  The main protagonist we follow is George McGovern, of all people. I had no idea the "Peace Candidate" of the 60s had been a B-24 Pilot. But he was - and clearly a good one. He completed the 35 combat missions of a full tour, no mean feat. We see all the training an entire crew had to complete, as we meet a myriad of characters and stories along the way in the typical Ambrose style. Tons of anecdotes and a lot of tales of supremely costly mistakes. One is really impressed with the idea of the depth of this training. As personally a very informed reader of the WWII Air war, I did come to appreciate how much more complete and deep this scheme was compared to both enemies and allies.
  
  Then its on to Europe and a riveting account of Missions, Accidents and the various ways to land. Crews mainly come home alive, but there are stories of parachutes, POW Camps, Partizans, and random deaths associated with jettisoning bombs. Random death is everywhere, along with rational destruction. War.
  
  But there are also trips around Italy for culture. The high sexual energy of a young person's war is glimpsed. How the black market and popular culture bloomed. How the war fit in to the American and European social history gets some play. By comingling dozens of memories, Ambrose gives one a strong insight into the American Experience. His style recedes a little and the story comes to the fore, right where it should be. The fact that we know our hero will come home does help one amid the mayhem.
  
  For the Omnivore reader, the highlight of the whole thing might be Joseph Heller , the creator of Catch-22, saying "I had no Bad Officers". But there is plenty here to chew on. A junior reader will be well rewarded for the effort to read this book although the themes are quite adult. For the Military Enthusiast/Gamer/Modeller, this is great on both background and for Scenario/Diorama development. The stories of Cerrignola, the base in Italy that McGovern flew from will spawn a myriad of dioramas alone.
  
  
• 
  Nolan

  Ambrose had a wonderful ability to take what would seem like an almost-unmanageably large chunk of history and distill it into a tiny sliver that clarified the history and made the events more personal and vivid. That talent shines through in this book. A lesser writer would have tried to write about the entire B-24 flying experience, and you might have gotten at least a taste of what it was like. But by funneling the experience into a single crew, Ambrose is able to zoom in on the experience and make it less daunting and impersonal than it might have been had someone else attempted the history.
  
  Ambrose chose to focus on George McGovern, a 1972 presidential candidate, and his flight crew. You learn how McGovern became the pilot of the Dakota Queen, and you learn of the respect he garnered from his crew. In a highly readable way, you’ll learn about each function of the members of the crew and the training each one experienced to do that job. This book also explores the horrors of things like bombing accidents. McGovern recalled to the author decades later a situation in which he inadvertently bombed a farmhouse at noon. Having grown up on a farm, McGovern could only imagine that the noon meal was one in which the family would participate in full if possible. They would have thought themselves to be relatively safe in a quiet rural place. The accident and the knowledge that the bomb likely killed the entire family horrified him.
  
  While the book is sympathetic to McGovern, it is not a biography. It is, as it claims to be, an account of the B-24 flight crews and how they qualified for their jobs.
• 
  Christopher

  Band of Brothers in the skies with less immediacy. A fine little WWII book.
  
  Ambrose's "Wild Blue" follows the same basic formula of Band of Brothers in that he follows a single unit (here, former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern's B-24 bomber crew) throughout their wartime experience. To that end, we get mini biographies of all the crewmen and good insight into their feelings and conflicts (petty and otherwise) as they had to fly through west must have been truly terrifying anti aircraft fire and flak.
  
  I say "must have been truly terrifying" because for some reason "Wild Blue" never really conveys the terror of those bombing runs. It's hard to say why, but maybe it's Ambrose's style of relying on interviews decades after the fact and his own somewhat muted prose, but the reader is never *there* in the same way they are with Easy Company.
  
  Additionally, while the book styles itself as the story of those who flew bombing runs over Germany, the majority of McGovern's time was spent in other parts of the European theater. So, we don't get the visceral pleasure of taking the Eagle's Nest at the end of the war as in BoB.
  
  Ambrose says in the intro that McGovern was a longtime friend, and this feels more like a desire to tell of his friend's wartime experiences rather than a representative look at the air war in WWII. As an example in the former, it's excellent, if limited.
• 
  Mark Adderley

  A magnificent account of the brave lads who flew B-24s against Nazi Germany during the last few months of World War II. I love Stephen Ambrose as a historian of World War II. He gets you very close to the participants, and this book is not an exception. I didn't feel it was as compelling as
  Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest or
  Citizen Soldiers: The US Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, but it was an excellent read nevertheless.
• 
  Quinn Lavender

  Every time I read a book about a new aspect of WWII I am amazed at how much I didn't know. This time: European bomber crews. I had no idea how exposed bombers were - they just flew straight into whatever German fighter formations / anti-aircraft fire was there, and they held their breath that they'd make it. Their losses (percentage-wise) were far greater than any other armed serviceman.
  
  The title and subtitle of the book do not mention the fact that it is focused on Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern. When I read that in the preface I was kind of turned off by it; I wanted to learn the story of the "average joe" who flew B-24s, not somebody that ended up rising to political prominence later. But I will say that the book still read like a general history and not a trumped-up biography, and for that I am grateful. The book was extremely informative and enjoyable.
• 
  Graeme Bell

  Wow! An Ambrose book NOT connected to Band of Brothers. This is about the Army Air Force in Italy. Yes the 8th does get the publicity (Memphis Belle etc.) BTW the RAF gets a very small mention indeed. Not bad. Anyone out there think three stars is cruel?
• 
  Norman Oca

  Damn good book. Always expect good things from Stephen Ambrose.
• 
  Wai Zin

  When I bought this book, I thought it was about B 24 operation in WW2. But it turns out it's touch on George McGovern and some of his crew experience from their childhood, their training and their experience in the tail end of Ww2.
  
  While the book is well written and skill of the author help you get through till the end of the book, I will not read it again.
• 
  Mad Dan

  The first half of the book was good, it told the story of where the flyers came from and I did find the personal stories very interesting. But the second half, the wartime stories are not well told, and I found myself skipping a chapter or two..
• 
  'Aussie Rick'

  This book by Stephen Ambrose offers the reader an opportunity to learn about some of the men who flew the B-24 Liberator during WW2 from Italy. Most books cover the more glamorous B17 Flying Fortress flying missions against occupied Europe from bases in England. I confess that I have a love for the B-17 but always felt that I should try and find something about the B-24 which was still one of the mainstay bombers of the USAAF.
  
  This book fits the bill and provides a decent overall snapshot of the B-24, the training of the crews who flew it and their missions from bases in Italy during 1944-45. I would have liked more about the B-24’s combat missions earlier in the war against a highly active Luftwaffe however the focus of this book is on one crew, piloted by George McGovern who started missions with the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force, after the decline of the Luftwaffe, leaving German flak and weather as their greatest dangers.
  
  Overall this is still a very good account of what it takes for young men to fly highly dangerous missions against occupied Europe during WW2. The book is easy to read and utilises numerous first-hand accounts and interviews with veterans to high-light the dangers, the camaraderie, the missions and the results of combat flying on these young men, aged between 18 and 25. Well done to the author and well done to those brave men who climbed into their aircraft day-after-day during the Second World War.
  
• 
  Hannah

  I really love this book!
  
  Very interesting. It was more so the history of the B-24 'Liberator', and the build and layout of it, than anything else. Which was fine, by me. But, it was also a book on George McGovern and his crew. I think having a non-fiction historical book focus on one group of people or one person helps me to understand the story and everything a bit better.
  
  I really don't get where people come from when they say that Stephen E. Ambrose put too much detail into his works. I don't think it's too detailed, at all. And I think I would know because I HATE when a book has too much unnecessary detail.
  
  I don't know who else would get much enjoyment out of this book other than history teachers and WWII buffs. But I recommend it to anyone who devours every little bit of information they can on WWII, like myself, haha.
• 
  Todd

  This is a great history/biography of George McGovern and other pilots typical of those who flew the Liberator during World War II. What surprised me the most was the comparatively high percentage of these pilots who were killed or lost during missions, not to mention the hell it was to be hunted and shot at while one could do very little to defend himself. Numerically, the risk was even greater than that of the front-line soldier...not taking away from their record of sacrifice. A very interesting read about the mobilization, training, and day-to-day life of pilots who, for good reason, always felt it could be their last.