Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From Youth to Manhood in a Hurry, March 26, 2000
I was the original Copilot on Lauren Spleth's B-17 crew, on which John Briol was the Ball Turret Gunner. We trained as a crew in Florida and Virginia, then joined the Eighth Air Force's 457th Bomb Group, with whom we flew our 35 missions, beginning September 12, 1944. In violation of regulations, John kept a diary, which he brought home sewed in the lining of his Army field jacket. Some years after John's death, his son brought the diary to my attention. After reading it, I concluded it should be published. I added comments of other crew members and my own, and persuaded two ladies, residents of Berlin at the time of our last mission, to write about how it was to be bombed. I combined all these inputs into the diary, served as editor, and self published DEAD ENGINE KIDS in 1993. Our crew name, and the name of the book, came from our crew's record of failed and shot out engines. It took only one mission, our first one, to convert us from young kids to grown men. Even now, when Î open the book and begin to read, it's as if it all happened yesterday, and I'm scared all over again.
|
|
|
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Required reading..., June 3, 2002
This book is right up there with Bert Stiles' excellent book. It is dangerously readable: I bought it for a long trip, but read the first page and couldn't put it down... now I need another book to bring. Somehow books written after the war get filtered by memory, if only slightly. They seem a bit more glorious than reality. Books written about the air war while it was happening record something that the memoirs don't. This is a down and dirty B-17 book. The crew's accounts and feelings about the air war come through so clearly that it made me wonder why I was reading this book about such a difficult thing to endure. If you're interested in B-17's, or the air war in general, you need to read this book.
|
|
|
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Realistic: "Dead Engine Kids", April 2, 2000
By A Customer
"Dead Engine Kids" is a book written realistically. It reveals what it really was like to fly missions over Germany, and the anxiety and fear that each of the crew members felt. This book records events written down in diary form by the ball turret gunner and other members of the crew, expressing the realities of war. Two German women also wrote to tell their memories of living in Berlin when the Dead Engine Kids bombed it. The book far surpasses other books and movies concerning the air war over Germany. This account captures your attention from the time you begin to read it, and keeps it to the end. Avoiding foul language, the words and style are very good at generating and relating the feelings and emotions of the crew members during and between missions, in this period of their lives.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Brian O'Neill
