USA

040622 - BOMBS AWAY: WWII Air Force Stories 

By T/Sgt James Lee Hutchinson

"Bombs Away" – This is the author's second book on his WW II service as a B-17 radio operator in 20 combat missions in the 490th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. The book is compiled of stories about "Hutch" and other airmen as told by the combat crew members themselves. The stories paint vivid pictures of how it was to be a part of the Eighth Air Force's bombing missions that left England to blast targets in Hitler's Third Reich. Each day the skies filled with hundreds of B-17 Flying Fortress bombers and their escorts crossing the English Channel toward enemy targets heavily protected by anti-aircraft batteries and German fighters waiting to attack the heavy bombers. Hutch writes, "The crews manned their combat positions and waited for the hell they knew was coming". Airmen of the Fifteenth Air Force blasted enemy targets in the Italian and Mediteranian theater. The author's amazing stories of survival and/or death in the deadly skies is riveting. Stories from interviews with WWII veterans and information from the 490th Historical Record provide eyewitness accounts of bombing missions, fighter attacks, mid-air collisions, and airmen shot down and imprisoned in POW camps. Final chapters tell of a childhood in the poverty and hardships of the Great Depression.The 274 page book contains 29 photos, 72 war stories and 24 tales of a Hoosier boyhood.