LAST FLIGHT OF BOMBER 31: Harrowing Tales of American and Japanese Pilots Who Fought in World War II's Arctic Air Campaign, THE

Sea Power, Nov 2004 by Munns, David W

THE LAST FLIGHT OF BOMBER 31: Harrowing Tales of American and Japanese Pilots Who Fought in World War II's Arctic Air Campaign by Ralph Wetterhahn, New York: Carroll & Graf, Sept. 2004. 356 pp. $26.00 ISBN: 0-7867-1360-7

U.S. Navy fliers stationed in the Aleutians fought bitter battles during World War II above the Bering Sea and northern Pacific. Dubbed riders of the "Empire Express," these pilots flew sorties over thousands of miles, often for nine hours at a time, to bomb Japanese installations in the Kurile Islands of the northern Pacific.

The flyers confronted tremendous hazards, flying while dangerously low on fuel and in planes damaged by anti-aircraft fire. Colby Award-winning author Ralph Wetterhahn brings their often forgotten stories to life through in-depth interviews with American and Japanese combatants.

The struggle is portrayed as relentless, and the catalog of stories attests to its grueling challenge. At one point, Wetterhahn writes, "Now it was Whitman's turn to take off, at 3:06 A.M., three hours later than scheduled. He lined up the runway and shoved the throttles forward. Bomber 31 rumbled into the air and skimmed above the crash boat still circling the area where Moore's plane had gone down. Out over Massacre Bay the PV-1 Ventura sped, past Murder Point, clawing skyward toward the Japanese nearly seven hundred cold, leaden sea miles west across the international dateline and into the next day."

As though the stories were clockwork, each one unfolds with inexorable detail through the eyes of the pilots and crewmen who attended to the flights. Many either had to make emergency landings on Soviet soil or abandon their aircraft in icy seas. Rescuing from obscurity the U.S. Navy missions of pilots like Walt S. Whitman, who made a forced landing on the Kamchatka Peninsula during fierce combat, Wetterhahn does an excellent job of capturing all elements of the battle, including Japanese perspective into the conflict.

Underlying the episodes accounted for in the book, the politics of the war are brought to life. Though allies in the war against Germany, the Soviets were officially neutral in the struggle between the U.S. and Japan. The Soviets, in fact, initially refused to give an accurate count for Americans flyers lost on their soil.

The mystery surrounding these lost crews has persisted for decades. In an attempt to reconstruct, and perhaps solve, the mysteries surrounding the MIAs and POWs during these battles, Wetterhahn reconstructs the exploits of crews lost during battle. He investigates the crash site of two Empire Express planes, discovered in the Soviet Far East in 2000, and reconstructs the events that must have unfolded during the instant of their demise.

There are more than 85 photographs and maps in The Last Flight of Bomber 31, and Wetterhahn's expertise makes these previously unheralded tales stand out among heroic triumphs in naval aviation. With gripping prose, the book is a document of not just a flight, but an era that attests to the strength and endurance exhibited by naval aviators and their courageous crews during World War II.