Customer Reviews

Gidi Gidi Boom Boom

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My father was a nose-gunner on a B-24. Like many of his generation,
he did not speak very openly of his service in WWII. The old saying,
"You don't know what you've got 'till it's gone," rings very true to me.
Since his passing, I have found myself trying to understand what he may
have experienced over 60 plus years ago.

This book takes us on a clear and insightful journey. It begins
with the soldiers' early days in training, continues through their last
day in battle, and ends with their final confinement in an overcrowded,
Bulgarian POW camp. I felt as if I were truly there watching the close
bonds form between crewmates and fellow prisoners.

Robert Johnson is able to record a true sense of what these young
men in their position experienced. It's a feeling I don't think even
Hollywood could capture.

It is an excellent account of events and is highly documented.
Thank you, Mr. Johnson, for helping me understand the true meaning
of some of the many sacrifices the men of this generation endured in
the name of freedom.

The American POW experience in Bulgaria during WWII has seldom been told and has been largely overlooked in our American history. Even more rare are firsthand accounts. Bob Johnson was there, a young top turret gunner on a B-24 bomber, shot down by German fighters. Even though he was there, he didn't rely solely on his own memories to tell his story.
His research took him to Bulgaria, in search of answers. He interreviewed fellow survivors and obtained government records,in order to provide the big picture on efforts by the U.S. government to obtain the release of these POWs, and subsequent actions to hold individual Bulgarians accountable for war crimes.
This book is an accurate accounting of POW life in Bulgaria, as well as a wonderful story of a young man who went to war. --by J. Whiting, 485th BG Assoc. Historian and author of "Don't Let the Blue Star Turn Gold".

As an English major, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was an English teacher's dream with its outstanding use of poetic devices and literary images, as well as the fact that the story itself was spellbinding. I highly recommend it. Carolyn Parker

I heartily recommend this book by a B-24 Bomber crew member shot down over Bulgaria while on a bombing run to the Romanian Ploesti oil fields during WWII and incarcerated in a Bulgarian POW camp. It is a touching,insightful,literary, philosophical, and humane account of the life and war-time experiences of a teenage youth from a modest background in Texas and his warm late-in-life relations with Bulgarians from the area of the camp. It should be interesting not only to WWII buffs and autobiography, memior, and reminiscence fans, but also to readers interested in the unique civil Bulgarians.

Well written with a tremendous amount of research from both the axis and allied perspective. This is truely one of the few war novels that has make the effort to see the event in real time from both sides of the war. I now better appreciate what was happening when our bombs were dropped, our bullets fired and our prisoners lost behind enemy lines.