Customer Reviews

The Wild Blue: The Novel of the U.S. Air Force

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Though fictional, this is a pretty accurate account of USAF life from early days when AAF became USAF up to mid-70's. This reviewer served in USAF from "brown shoe days" to "blue suiter" days, most of period covered by book and appreciates material presented. Though mostly about pilots, this navigator reviewer was pleased. Well written. A "good read". Follows careers of several characters and is at times somewhat disjointed, but overall a book deserving a reader's time.

The Wild Blue by Walter Boyne and Steven Thompson tells it like it really was during the most difficult growing pains and historically significant successes of the U.S. Air Force. The stretch for the stars is seen thru the eyes of the people who did the stretching, from the dedicated sergeant working thru the night to the idealistic pilot willing to sacrifice himself for his mission. The struggles and rewards, the failures and successes of these brave families and patriots are told with the accuracy of a reporter who was there and lived thru it. From the troops in the bars to the all too political movers and shakers who maneuvered the system to build the strongest and most capable Air Force in the world, this book tells it like it was.

A tremendous, well-written, and highly accurate epic story that follows the careers of several USAF officers throughout their careers. As an Air Force Major with 15 years of service, I can tell you that this book is the most realistic concerning all aspects of Air Force life and history that I have ever read. Colonel (retired) Boyne weaves the stories of each officer's life together into the tremendous history of the USAF since 1947. His highly accurate accounts of every major USAF milestone together with honest, heartfelt story telling combine to make this a special book....it should be mandatory reading for every current and future USAF officer!

This single book purports to tell the story of three pilots who entered the USAF after its post-war break from the army, and rose to prominent positions by the post Vietnam years. That's a lot of ground to cover (the "Eagles" novels also covered the postwar years, but stopped around the civil-rights era). The Berlin airlift, Korea, Vietnam, the cutbacks of the 1970's, the shift in strategies from high-altitude to low altitude "penetration" - all touch at least a few of the main characters, but don't touch for very long or go very deep. The story keys on three characters - the working-class hero hero, his African-American friend and co-achiever (who exists seemingly as the hero's conscience, but also to remind the hero not to use him to push his northern liberal views on race on southern servicemen) and the hero's inevitable foil - the USAF brat who's not above using family connections to advance his own career or take some potshots at others. Though hero and foil compete against each other in training, foil takes the upper hand when he opts against going to fly fighters in Korea. Later during the golden-age of flight test, our hero's rival pushes his own pet project, a low-level fighter plane that can equip both navy and USAF units, and forces our hero to test it. Characters make transitions back and forth (the rival's wife becomes an alcoholic frump, pulls herself togther, only to regress again, all in the space of a few paragraphs in which she's not otherwise an active participant; the hero becomes an alcoholic as well, if only to give him a flaw which he must vanquish). Too much of what people in "Wild Blue" say comes offless as what people might have been thinking and more of what people today would say years later - it's easy to see in hindsight how the F-4 Phantom, a navy jet, could satisfy the need for a multi-role fighter for all services (it took two planes in each service to replace it entirely), but the extreme complexity, the maintenance nightmare and the revolutionary concept the plane empbodied would have made it an unlikely choice at the time. Also, the novel straddles the line between history and fiction in the wrong places. When Boyne gets to the airplane intended as the multi-service fighter, he pulls off a monumental cheat - in reality, the plane was the F-111, a tactical strike-fighter meant to fly from air force bases and aircraft carriers, and lamented in both roles. While the F-111 eventually earned distinction in Desert Storm (by which time, technology caught up with the concept), it was an unpopular plane with USAF crews, and utterly rejected by the USN entirely. In "Wild Blue", the plane is ignored entirely. Instead, Boyne introduces a completely fictitious aircraft that coincidentally fills the same role, is tailored for high-speed automatic flight with a terrain-following radar, seats its aircrew the same way and, because it's as ahead of its time as the F-111 was, proves as buggy-prone as the real deal. (This is similar to a fighter in Boyne's WWII entry in the Eagle's series, a fictitious plane that otherwise sounds exactly like the P-39). I know that in historical novels, there's always a point at which the history gives way to the novel, and vice-versa, but the F-111 seems the poor place to draw the line. The navy end of the F-111 controversy seems missed completely. Although this is an air force book, the omission only clues us in to how the story leaves out the navy entirely, even though the story of each has significance for the other. (It's like a Vietnam-war novel that has no Vietnamese characters at all). Boyle also misses parts of the USAF story that I would have like to see covered - clashes between the USAF leadership and the president in general, but also some specific historical controversies - whether the B-36 should have won out both over Jack Northrop's flying wings and over the Navy's super-carriers as well, why there were no B-36's in Korea, whether anybody really considered using the bomb there and in Vietnam, and the controversy over manned bombers over missile. (Controversy over the B-70 bomber, one of my favorite planes, was one of several foci between Curt LeMay and the Mcnamara era, yet the issue with its many related sub-issues never comes to light here; instead, a proposed supersonic bomber is sacrificed near the end of the book for political purposes - a story that closer approximates the Russian Backfire bomber than one of our own planes). "Wild Blue" is meant to be an historical novel, but it's not only light on history but on the novel sidea as well. Once we meet our characters, we already know what we're supposed to think of them - there's little plot development and few surprises, and since those who read the book already know enough about the subject matter, what's left to grab them?