Customer Reviews

Fatal Army Air Forces Aviation Accidents in the United States, 1941-1945 (3 Volume Set)

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Anthony Mireles has somehow managed to compile a monumental amount of very valuable information into a well-laid out and easily accessible format. Besides the date, location, and type of aircraft lost, many entries include notes of interest. The author uses an abbreviated but comprehensive writing style to describe how each loss occurred. The names of aircrew are listed in the mishap summary as well as an invaluable index.

The appendices alone are exemplary and very helpful. In fact, I have never seen a more complete listing of continental USAAF airfields anywhere.

The blood and sweat Mireles must've put into this staggering project is difficult to imagine. Going through 6,000+ accident reports on 16mm microfilm reels, indexing them, and then summarizing what can often be dozens of pages of bureaucratic rambling causation descriptions. Amazing!

There is even a list of all of the Still Missing Army aircraft from the war years. I had no idea there were so many.

This is a superlative reference work for aviation enthusiasts and historians, a must have. Fatal Army Air Forces Aviation Accidents in the United States, 1941-1945 is a valuable asset for anyone researching WWII aviation, specific aircraft types, or the fate of servicemen and their airplanes. I salute Anthony Mireles and his publisher for pursuing such an enormous task. This will be a classic WWII reference in every aerophile's library.

"Must have asset" is not idle praise. Anthony Mireles's trilogy proved to be one my most valuable resources while writing Aircraft Accidents in Florida From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.
His introduction in Volume 1 will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in aviation history; 6,350 fatal Army Air Forces accidents in the US, 7,114 airplanes lost and 15,530 fliers and civilians killed. You can't just read those numbers and turn the page. How did they die? Why so many? Those fliers didn't die in combat, they were here, at home in the US, never seeing a shot fired in anger. Were the airplanes defective? Some were, but only by reading the hundreds of excellent recaps of official accident reports in the three volumes can you begin to get a feel for the multitude of causes of why and how these young men died.

The last third of volume three brings it all together; accident statistics by each year of the war, names of the Army Air Forces (not Army Air corps, which lost its identity with the formation of the Army Air Forces in June,1941, six months before Pearl Harbor) bases and air fields where these men trained, and most important to historians, an alphabetical Aircraft Index by manufacturer listing model number and serial number of every plane lost, when it crashed and where to find the report in the book. Whew! That's not all; a location index, alphabetically by state listing location and date of accident, and finally, a name and date of crash index of every fatality.

I thought long and hard before spending so much on a research tool. I can say now, without qualification that's the best money I ever spent to improve my knowledge and understanding of WW II aircraft accidents. Bob Widner

I was told by the author several years ago to expect this book. After many delays it is finally available and I might add, worth the wait. My comments are not meant to be cliche. This is one monumental three volume work whose meticulous research was the reason for its delay in being published.

Thousands of military aircraft were lost within the United States during WWII by all three services plus the Coast Guard. Many of us in the search and rescue business have seen the numerous wrecks that are scattered throughout the West as we go about our business looking for other missing aircraft. Like the author, I always wondered about the circumstances of these crashes which, by the 1970s, were long forgotten to history except by those few who remembered them.

Accident reports filed by the military services detail these incidents and their causes. But these reports are available only to the few of us who specialize in researching crash sites or who can afford to buy them. The author has taken these thousands of accident reports from the WWII US Army Air Forces, identified the 6,300 or so fatal ones, and have summarized them into this three volume set. Reading them is fascinating. Some examples include:

- The young navigator who disappeared from a B-24 while on a night, over water navigation training mission. Last seen headed for the rear of the aircraft, there is no evidence that he jumped since none of the aircraft's hatches or exits were opened during the flight. He simply vanished.

- The tragic accident in 1943 involving the CG-4 Glider which crashed during a demonstration flight due to structural failure. Among those killed was the Mayor of St Louis, MO, his city comptroller, the local Chamber of Commerce President as well as the two man crew and the officer in charge of the Army's Glider Procurement Program. The investigation found that the company who produced the glider did not follow the aircraft specifications which resulted in a wing strut to fail. The tragic irony, is that both the President and Vice President of the company who made the glider were also killed in the same crash.

- The numerous aicraft that were not found until many years after the war. They include the missing P-40 in California in 1941 that was not found until 1959, the two B-24s that disappeared over California the same night in 1943 and were not found until 1955 and 1960. The UC-78 that vanished in Arizona and not found until 1974. The most recent find is the P-38 lost in 1942 and not found until Sep 1997 in Washington State. At the back of Volume III is a list of about 75 USAAF aircraft that have still not been found.

- While many of the accidents were the result of the realistic training necessary to prepare aircrews for combat, some of incidents epitomize what the author calls the senseless carelessness that also kill people when you're training for war. The numerous unauthorized "dogfights" that ended in tragedy, the numerous crewmen who simply walked into moving propellors, the fatal misjudgements about weather, aircraft performance and navigation that pilots make even to this day.

Aside from sifting through all the reports, the author attempted to run down resolution of the numerous missing aircraft that were not found until well after the war ended. The USAAF attempted to up date or complete their accident reports as new leads came in or when planes were finally found. However, it seems that when the U.S. Air Force came into existance in 1947, these updates stopped. As much as possible, the author provides closure information on the aircraft found well after the war ended.

I now have a fuller understanding for the older military pilots I flew SAR with back in the 1970s. It seemed to me that they understood the concept of "safety" as just another word. That was because they grew up in an air force where pilots and aircraft were expendable and accidents were the "cost" of the dangerous business of flying.

One thing this book does not do is that it does not give you Lat/Long locations for these crash sites. It does not provide a current status of the crash site. He does not list the incidents by the original accident report numbers, but by his own tracking system as explained in Volume I. Neither does it list any fatal crashes for the other services unless it involved a USAAF aircraft. In addition, it only covers fatal accidents within the Continental U.S. It does not cover accidents in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico nor the rest of the Americas, such as Canada, Mexico and Latin America.

I forwarned the author that despite his intense research, he must be prepared for corrections and additional information. He has already made provisions for this on his website as listed in Volume I.

For the historian of WWII aviation as well as those of us who are serious in researching military crash sites, this book is a must for your library. Despite it's high price, this well researched and well written book stands heads and shoulders above similar books and is a must have. My hope now is that the author will now turn his attention to fatal aircraft accidents for the other services. And maybe one for all the non-fatal USAAF accidents. In whatever he decides to do, if he maintains the same high standard of research and accuracy he will produce another must have book.

Wow! Anthony Mireles' three-volume set is a tremendous accomplishment, an obvious labor of love that is a veritable treasure trove of detailed information on the 6,300+ USAAF aircraft that were lost in stateside accidents in World War II. Sadly, more aircraft were lost in training than in actual combat and Mireles' set is the definitive guide to those losses.

The three-volume set is arranged as follows: Volume 1 details accidents from January to June 1943; Volume 2, July 1943-July 1944; and Volume 3, August 1944 through December 1945. Volume 3 also includes appendices on Losses by Year, AAF Stations in the States, Lost Aircraft Arranged by Manufacturer, Loss Location by State, etc.

Full details are given on the aircraft, crew, mission, circumstances of the flight and crash, fate of the crew, post-crash investigation results and so on. The author deserves a big thumb's up for the monumental job of researching numerous documents and blending all the data into an eminently readable whole.

(I was particularly interested in discovering what information Mireles had uncovered on the loss of Major Dick Bong who died on 6 August 1945 flying an early P-80. Back in 1985, I wrote the definitive biography of Major Bong, ACE OF ACES, THE DICK BONG STORY. Mireles' account was almost a full page in length and included some details I hadn't been aware of myself)!

The cause of the crashes run the gamut from in-flight fires to structural failures, mid-air collisions to bad weather. Sadly, far too many crashes were the result of human error, too many pilots being lost buzzing civilian homes, flat-hatting around the base, etc. The aircraft involved run the gamut from B-17s to P-63s, A-26s to P-38s, B-24s to P-40s, L-5s to A-20s.

What is especially fascinating about the accounts in FATAL ARMY AIR FORCES AVIATION ACCIDENTS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1941-1945 is the occasional oddball incident such as the AT-6 that crashed at Kingman, AZ on 17 September 1944 when an EM tried to take it for an unauthorized ride, reason unknown, and crashed fatally. Or the B-29 navigator who got sick on a gunnery mission out of Walker AAB, KS. The B-29 landed, the navigator got out, the Superfort took off again and soon after buzzed a house, crashing into the house. The crew of 10 and two civilians, relatives of the co-pilot, perished. Or the unlucky woman who was fishing near Grayling, MI when three low-flying P-47s buzzed her boat on 2 August 1944. On their last pass, one of the Jugs sliced into her with its prop, killing her instantly. As can be seen, the amount of detail in each account is simply incredible.

Though the $195.00 price-tag is daunting, this set is well worth the price and rates six stars in my book. All hard-core AAF enthusiasts will want to add this to their collection. Highly recommended.

This book is not for the General aviation historian nor is it written for the specific WWII Aviation Historian - The author seems to have missed the mark in writing this book....

The book is a disappointment on many levels - while the author has summerized the fatal accident reports for the WWII time period he left out details that would help the aviation historian. Details such as aircraft markings, units assigned to, exact location of crash all have been left out. To make the book even more difficult to use, to find out exactly which aircraft was involved in a summery, you have to go to book three and tediously search each reference for a specific aircraft to track down the aircraft serial number - this could have easily been placed in the summery.

No photos at all

For a 200.00 book it was printed on cheap paper, no slip case - this information could easily have been done on a CD in a searchable format...

It would be cheaper, more informative to order the microfilm of the accident reports