Dimensions
171 x 234 x 25mm
On April 24, 1943, the first of thirty-six B-24 Liberator bombers, manned by skeleton crews, lifted off from San
Francisco en route to Australia in secrecy. It was the first of five legs in the overseas movement of the 380th Heavy Bomb Group, known to a small circle as "The Flying Circus."
James Wright was a second lieutenant who was wholly unprepared for this first night leg of the journey into the Pacific combat zone, and for the horrors of war to follow. He takes the reader to the slapped-together base camp in a desolate section of Australia, close to the Japanese bases with whom the 380th traded raids almost nightly. Wright flies sorties over kangaroo wastelands and into Timor, as well as into "Suicide Alley," where lay the airfields on the heavily defended Solomon Islands.
This book is about the action, but it's also about the melting pot that was the army greeting a young man from Texas, what it took to be the bombardier - whose proficiency made or broke missions - and what formed a man who would stand astride the national stage for more than three decades.
