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RACE OF ACES by John R. Bruning

RACE OF ACES

WWII's Elite Airmen and the Epic Battle To Become the Masters of the Sky

by John R. Bruning

Pub Date: Jan. 14th, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-50862-9
Publisher: Hachette

The air war in the Pacific takes a competitive turn in this overstuffed tale.

It was a stroke of genius on the part of George Kenney, a general in the U.S. Army Air Forces, when, in the early days of World War II, he orchestrated a visit from Eddie Rickenbacker, the great ace from the previous global conflict, and set up a contest that would award the first pilot to match Rickenbacker’s kill count of 26 enemy planes with a bottle of bourbon. The pilots under Kenney’s command, as Bruning (Indestructible: One Man’s Rescue Mission That Changed the Course of WWII, 2016) writes in an overlong but generally satisfying account, immediately got to work, hopping from island to island under intense enemy fire for the next three years, taking tremendous losses. At the same time, Kenney saw put into service the faster, more maneuverable Lockheed P-38 Lightning combat plane. A raid on a Japanese airfield in the Aleutians proved the worth of the P-38 combined with the earlier P-39 Airacobra fighter and B-24 bomber. In time, several pilots, including Richard Bong and Gerald Johnson, had kill counts in the two dozen range, and the race was really on. This led some to take major risks, as when a pilot named Tom Lynch violated the rule “never to make a second strafing run over the same target” and was blown out of the sky over New Guinea. A surprising moment comes near the end of the war, and the narrative, when Charles Lindbergh travels to the theater and flies with the aces even though, as a civilian, he risks being summarily executed if captured. The war had become so savage that neither side was offering any quarter, but Lindbergh “had little interest in Japanese atrocities” but instead “heaped scorn and moral outrage on his fellow Americans." A sad coda comes when two aces who survived the war died soon after in aviation accidents.

Combat aviation buffs will enjoy Bruning’s explorations of a little-known history.