12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comprehensive yet deeply personal, November 15, 2001
This review is from: Birds from Hell: History of the B-29 (Hardcover)
The late Wilbur Morrison's final contribution to our understanding of the airwar during WWII is a comprehensive yet deeply personal account of the B29 Superfortress, the 20th Air Force, and General Curtis E. LeMay. Another title that could easily fit in any number of the Booklist's categories, Birds From Hell not only recounts the genesis of the B29, but elaborates in fine detail the plane's many early teething problems; notably the propensity for its Wright-Cyclone engines to catch fire! Morrison served an extended combat tour as a bombardier aboard B29's in the Pacific and CBI Theatres. His accounts of the massive, staggering destruction of carpet bombing over various Asian cities makes for can't put down reading. General LeMay is singled out for special praise due to his keen insight into air operations and his almost singlehanded efforts to improve the operational effectiveness of the B29. Often, his decisions were viewed controversially, yet, without exception his decisions appear correct granted the luxury of hindsight. Morrison contends that the war against Japan was effectively over "prior" to the B29 nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and that the latter events simply speeded the inevitable Japanese surrender. Highlights include the author's recollections of his own combat missions in the face of repeated attack by Japanese fighters and ferocious flak. His observations on life in India, and post-war Japan also bear note.
A comment on the book's jacket notes that Morrison flew "five hundred combat missions." Obviously, this should read 500 "hours". The publisher is aware of the misprint and has said that later editions will show the correction.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, September 21, 2004
This review is from: Birds from Hell: History of the B-29 (Hardcover)
The author, Wilbur Morrison, was a B-29 bombardier from the earliest days of this airplane's operational career during WII. As such, his personal experience with the B-29 makes for somewhat of an interesting read. But that's about it for this book.
Morrison was put into a ground staff position, which meant that a) he didn't fly as many missions as other bombardiers and b) his operational flight career got stretched out for the duration of WWII. This has pluses and minuses for the book - on the one hand, he has personal tales of flying missions on the B-29, and he was there for the entire duration of the B-29's operations in WWII, but on the other hand, he was on the ground watching others fly missions (and crash and burn) a lot. It also meant that he was close enough to the higher level people like Curtis LeMay to know them on a staff level, but wasn't high ranking enough to be personally involved in the planning of combat operations.
The biggest, most ANNOYING problem with this book is that the author re-counts a great deal of the history of the higher level planning involving the B-29's operations by re-creating these very long conversations between Curtis LeMay and others. Now, in the preface, he says that these conversations really did occur and that he got this information from interviewing LeMay and other people. I do believe that he did do these interviews, and these people did give him a lot of information, but I doubt that they actually could have remembered what they said verbatim like what is set down in this book. These long conversations read like extensive stretches of exposition from a movie script. A lot of what is said just doesn't sound like people talking in real-life. It just reads like a very artificial way of setting down third-person information that could have been recounted better from a standard historian's perspective.
Finally, there is surprisingly little technical information about the workings of the B-29 bomber itself in this book. This is the biggest bummer of all about this book. This book really isn't about the B-29 bomber.
I have read a few other books about the B-29. "Superfortress" by Curtis LeMay and Bill Yenne, has LeMay recounting in a much more realistic first-person style what his thoughts and actions were all about during the B-29 campaign, and is especially good at giving you a sense of how well LeMay managed the logistical difficulties of the B-29 bombing campaign. It's a slim book, though, and the technical aspects of the bomber are glossed over and appear to have been filled in by Yenne (the switching off between LeMay's rough and tumble jargon, and Yenne's formal historian-speak is a bit jarring). "Bombers over Japan" by Keith Wheeler, a Time-Life book, has an excellent mix of the technical workings of the B-29 as well as a solid account of its operational history. There are lots of photos and drawings of the innards of the B-29. "Saga of the Superfortress" by Steven Birdsall has a thorough historical account of the B-29's operational history.
Anyway, these other books are better, but are out of print, unfortunately. LeMay's book gives a more direct insight into his thoughts and plans, and has some excellent explanations and justifications for his campaign of massive firebombing (the original reason, as it turns out, was not to crush the Japanese into submission, but because a combination of poor US intelligence, bad weather, lousy navigation, and technical problems with the B-29 all made early attempts at "precision bombing" of Japan completely hopeless. The B-29 was able to successfully take out Japanese war factories or installations only by burning down entire cities. Later on, as the deadline for the US invasion of Japan loomed, LeMay desperately wanted to end the war with Japan before the invasion, to save US casualties, and at that point he was all set to completely annihilate all of Japan with firebombing if need be. He would have, too, if the atomic bomb had not intervened). The Wheeler book is really good for the technical stuff. There are other excellent books as well, but so far these are the only ones that I've found on the B-29. It seems like a lot of the best books are out of print. After being disappointed by buying this book, I'm mostly going to go to the library for other books like this one from now on.
Reading all of these books, one really gets the sense that the B-29 was an experimental plane, and quite dangerous to its own aircrews. The engines were just so unreliable that they could just quit at any time, or worse yet, set the plane on fire, which was why so many B-29's crashed and burned. Japan really did not have any sort of a developed air defense system, like Germany did; otherwise the B-29's would have fared much more poorly.
In summary, "Birds From Hell" turns out to be just another one of the many first-person histories of WWII experiences that are proliferating out there right now, as the Greatest Generation fades into memory. It tries to be more than that, but doesn't really succeed. And it is not a technical book about the B-29 bomber itself.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
B-29 Bombardier's Story, April 12, 2010
This review is from: Birds from Hell: History of the B-29 (Hardcover)
This is not a nuts & bolts book about the B-29. The author, who flew in B-29's as a bombardier, does spend some time reviewing some of the important facts on the development of Boeing's new bomber. The early B-29's had a lot of problems- they were ordered into production before the first prototype ever flew, were the cutting edge of technology for the 1940's. The Air Force crews had to create tactics to use the planes in the air war against Japan.
The success of these planes led to the Japanese nickname - Birds from Hell, because that is exactly what the B-29's delivered- pure hell. The author traces the history of the bomber from development to the A-bombs on Japan. The book is high quality print. Not a lot of photos, but enough to help. I enjoyed reading this book as it gave an insider's view of what it was like to fly these planes into combat. The experiences of the air crews flying against Japan were very different than those who fought Germans.
It's not a perfect book - the writing style is somewhat stilted by today's standards, but I've seen that in many other works on WW2. One can wonder if the dialogue is 100% accurate after 40 years of time elapses, but I still recommend reading this for those who are interested in the people behind the weapons. It's a worthwhile book to show what it was like back in WW2 flying a massive, piston engine bomber against a fanatical enemy. For serious aviation fans, this is a worthy addition to your library.
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