Product Overview
This gem of a book traces the transformation of a small-town boy who hated fist-fights into a seasoned B-29 tail gunner in World War II. Step-by-step, the author takes the reader into the Air Corps, through gunnery school, and on twenty-one bombing missions over Japan -- one of which ended in the death of three of his crewmates. The book is dedicated to those men.
But Backwards Into Battle is far more than a war story. Andy Doty recalls youth who may have been the last truly innocent generation in America -- teen-agers who did not drink nor smoke nor use drugs, and knew little about sex. It was a time when two boys never fought one boy, nor one boy against a smaller opponent. Kicking was not tolerated; anyone caught carrying a knife in school was subject to permanent banishment. Firearms were totally out of the question.
It was a generation taught by dedicated school teachers, most of them unmarried, who demanded that we diagram the structure of sentences properly, recite the multiplication tables without a slip, and remember the outcome of the Peloponnesian Wars. Their right to grab an unruly boy by the ear and hustle him out of the classroom and into the principal's office was unquestioned.
His was a highly patriotic generation, as well, one whose heroes were Ethan Allen, John Paul Jones, the Rough Riders, Admiral Farragut and Sergeant York. The author and his friends viewed war as an accepted - even inevitable - way of life. To insure his acceptance into the Air Corps, he bought a book of tips on how to pass the entrance examinations.
The flavor of World War II military service is vividly portrayed: railroad terminals teeming with servicemen and echoing with train announcements; homesick 18-year-olds at night on their cots at a firing range; men lined up with their mess trays on swaying troop trains; seas of white sailor hats and army khaki on the streets of Honolulu; the barracks humor, Big Band music and wartime ballads that made danger and boredom tolerable for sixteen million Americans far from their friends and families.
The author's descriptions of his combat missions from Guam to Japan have been described as the best to come out of the B-29 campaign. They contain both the technical aspects of his tail gunner's trade as well as the fear he felt as antiaircraft fire crashed about his bomber over Nagoya -- or as his aircraft was caught in a cluster of searchlights eight thousand feet above blazing Tokyo.
Nor has anyone better captured the harrowing experience of bailing out of a faltering bomber into the dark sea -- a bail-out delayed when the strap of the author's life raft pack became snagged in his folded tail gunner's seat. As the bailout bell rang, he began tugging desperately at the strap and considered cutting it with his knife to allow him to dive out his escape hatch.
The author sums it all up at the end, commenting on the need to use atomic bombs to end the war and on the moral posturing of revisionist historians who condemn the bombings. Andy Doty explores also why and how men risk their lives time and again in wartime, often in the face of great odds. Backwards Into Battle is a touching personal account of the days when the youth of a united, resourceful, determined nation fought in the costliest, most destructive war in world history. The book defines in gentle but honest words the young men who participated in that monumental conflict.
