Or Go Down in Flame
A Navigator's Death Over Schweinfurt
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"The engrossing story of an American professor's quest to learn how his older brother was killed in WWII . . . many poignant moments" (Publishers Weekly).
"Black Thursday," the second Schweinfurt raid, was the most savagely fought air battle in US history and a milestone in the course of World War II. On October 14, 1943, the US Eighth Air Force launched nearly three hundred bombers deep into German territory to destroy the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt, hoping this would bring enemy industry to a halt.
On that clear, sunlit day, hundreds of German fighters raced among the unescorted B-17s, guns blazing, knocking down plane after plane, each with ten men aboard. By the end of the day, the flight path of the Flying Fortresses was marked across the breadth of Germany by towering pillars of smoke from crashed machines, fiery tributes to six hundred lost airmen.
W. Raymond Wood was just a child when his brother was lost in the Schweinfurt raid, and the minute details of this book are the result of his multi-year effort to illuminate "Black Thursday" as no writer has before. He not only reveals the experience of the American flyers in this famous battle, but that of the civilians on the ground and the enemy fighters who flew against the bomber stream, including the Me-110 pilot who in all probability destroyed his brother's plane with a rocket.
Illustrated with forty-eight pages of photos and original documents, this book examines the air war against the Third Reich, then brings the reader into the center of harrowing air combat, and finally chronicles the little-known operations after war's end to retrieve and identify our dead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is the engrossing story of an American professor's quest to learn how his older brother was killed in WW II and the process by which the body was transported to its final resting place, the family plot in Missouri. Lt. Elbert S. Wood, navigator on a B-17 bomber during a 1943 raid over Germany, was the sole member of the crew who did not parachute safely to ground after the plane was damaged. (Lt. Wood, wounded, was probably strangled by his own parachute lines.) The author interviewed surviving crewmen, visited the crash site and questioned German civilians who attended Lt. Wood's funeral in the small Bavarian town where his body was taken. He constructed an outline of his brother's military career and a moment-by-moment account of his last mission. In one of many poignant moments, Wood pays tribute to the town Burgermeister who went out of his way to give an American airman a dignified burial (German soldiers on leave served as guards of honor) ``when this was not a popular or even safe course of action.'' The book may also be read as an exemplar of how to research the fate of an American combat casualty. Wood teaches anthropology at the University of Missouri. Photos.
