Lynness: Nov/Dec read(s)

Well, I did read about the Tuskegee Airmen, as planned: I read a book called Black and White Airmen: Their True History.  The book is an older juvenile read- maybe 8th grade or so, which was fine for me- I didn't want too much in-depth tactical stuff or analysis, just the story.  It told of two men (the coauthors, who are now best friends and go around speaking to groups about their experiences) who met as retirees and discovered a parallel history- they were both pilots in WWII, both had grown up in the same city...come to find out, they had been in the same 3rd grade class!! But, one was black, the other white.  Neither remembered the other at all, and their experiences in WWII were widely different.  Through their narratives, one gets a glimpse of what it was like to be a pilot in WWII in Europe.  I'll clarify what I said about the Tuskegee Airmen in my last post: evidently it was widely circulated that not a single one of the bombers that the Tuskegee Airmen escorted were lost, but others say about 25 bombers were lost.  BUT, they were formidable and very successful because they stuck with their bombers.  Unlike many of the white pilots with similar jobs, they did not abandon their bombers to go chasing after Germans, trying to be the hero of the day.  Most of the time, that's exactly what the Germans were trying to do- lead them on a wild goose chase to leave the bombers unprotected.  The Germans soon learned that the red-tailed planes wouldn't be deterred and, on at least one mission, evidently engaged the escorts as the primary target.

And then came December 7.  I realized it was Pearl Harbor Day and decided to look into a book on that.  I found an older (1957) book entitled Day of Infamy.  It was like 9/11- everyone in this generation remembers where they were and what they were doing when the towers were hit.  For everyone in that generation, it was Pearl Harbor.  The book is a very fast-paced, all over the place kind of book.  It was like slow motion- a couple hundred pages or so to cover a few fateful hours.  There were hundreds of names, but you don't have to remember 95% them to follow the story- it was vignettes, clips, of hundreds of experiences all at the same time.  Most from the American side, some from the Japanese.  You know what's coming and where it came from, but you learn how it all plays out kind of like the men did: bit by bit, something you heard, something you saw.  There are comical moments, deadly ones, confusion, etc... you see some men absolutely incapacitated by fear, some emboldened to heroic feats by patriotism and adrenalin, and everyone swept along by the mass confusion and then the call to duty and then the aftermath.  I highly recommend the book to anyone, especially those wanting to get a look at how we were caught off guard, how we reacted, etc..

Some other books I've read recently: The Wednesday Letters, and Tangerine, and I've started Midnight's Children and Freakonomics.  What an eclectic mix!