The Wild Blue - An Excellent Read

After I had the honor of meeting Senator George McGovern in the Minneapolis airport in late June, a colleague told me about the book "The Wild Blue" and said I had to read it. I quickly ordered it from Amazon.com and I finished reading it this week. Its definitely worth the effort.

Here's what Amazon has to say about the tome:

Long before he entered politics, when he was just in his early 20s, South Dakotan George McGovern flew 35 bomber missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery under fire. Stephen Ambrose, the industrious historian, focuses on McGovern and the young crew of his B-24 bomber, volunteers all, in this vivid study of the air war in Europe.
Manufactured by a consortium of companies that included Ford Motor and Douglas Aircraft, the B-24 bomber, dubbed the Liberator, was designed to drop high explosives on enemy positions well behind the front lines--and especially on the German capital, Berlin. Unheated, drafty, and only lightly armored, the planes were dangerous places to be, and indeed, only 50 percent of their crews survived to the war's end. Dangerous or not, they did their job, delivering thousand- pound bombs to targets deep within Germany and Austria.

In his fast-paced narrative, Ambrose follows many other flyers (including the Tuskegee Airmen, the African American pilots who gave the B-24s essential fighter support on some of their most dangerous missions) as they brave the long odds against them, facing moments of glory and terror alike. "It would be an exaggeration to say that the B-24 won the war for the Allies," Ambrose writes. "But don't ask how they could have won the war without it." --Gregory McNamee

The heroism and guts that George McGovern and the other pilots showed in World War II was mystifying. The close-to-death situations they were in made my skin crawl at times. The story about McGovern landing a crippled B-24 on a 2,200 foot long runway on an island in the Adriatic was alone worth the cost of the book.

I cast my first vote in the 1972 election. My first vote was cast for George McGovern. He was my hero then because he wanted to end the futile killing of Americans in Vietnam. Yet, as this book points out, during the 1972 campaign one of the Republic Party's attack methods was to tell the public that George McGovern was a "coward" during the war. What utter unadulterated bullshit. I had forgotten that aspect of the campaign until I read this book and it brought back memories. It seems that questioning someone's patriotism and making them out as a coward are trademark Republic Party tactics. And its always done by people who never had to face flak at 25,000 on an eight hour mission with no bathroom on board the plane.

Go out and get this book. Its a quick read and it will make you proud we had leaders like George McGovern in the Democratic Party - and doing the fighting to really keep us free.