Bailout over Normandy

A suspenseful and witty memoir of an American World War II fighter pilot shot down over France and his outrageously brave adventures behind enemy lines.

A daredevil aviator in the famed 352nd Fighter Squadron, Ted Fahrenwald bailed out of his burning P-51 Mustang two days after D-day and was launched on a thrilling adventure in Occupied France. After months living and fighting with the French Resistance, he was captured by the Wehrmacht, interrogated as a spy, and interned in a POW camp—but he made a daring escape just before his deportation to Germany.
 
Despite Fahrenwald’s harrowing experiences, nothing diminished the ace’s talent for spotting ironic humor in even the most aggravating or dangerous situations—and nothing stopped his penchant for extracting his own improvised, and sometimes hilarious, version of justice.
 
Recently discovered but written shortly after the author’s discharge and return to the United States, Bailout Over Normandy is a remarkable memoir that reveals a rare literary talent. This WWII page-turner is an audaciously humorous tale of daring and friendship that brings vivid life to the daily bravery, mischief, and intrigues of fighter pilots, Resistance fighters, and allies in the air and on the ground.
After the war, Ted Fahrenwald never fulfilled his early ambition to be a writer or journalist. Instead, he started a family, and along with his brother ran a small steel mill inherited from their father. His writing talent was long recognized by family, however, and after Fahrenwald’s death in 2005, his daughter Madelaine was determined to seek a publisher for his memoir, which until then had only existed as a family heirloom. A second volume of Fahrenwald’s wartime writing, Wot a Way to Run a War, based on his letters home, was published in 2013.