Cold Blue Sky: A B-17 Gunner in World War Two, The

Flight Journal, Jun 1998 by DeGroat, Robert S

The Cold Blue Sky: AB-17 Gunner in World War Two by Jack Novey. Howell Press, 1147 River Rd., Ste. 2, Charlottesville, VA 22901; 208 pages, 42 b&w photographs; $24.95.

Imagine being a waist gunner, climbing into that small space you are to occupy for many hours, subject to the wind, the cold and the fear. Empty shell casings that cover your section of the floor cause you to slip as you fight for your life.

Author Jack Novey relives those days in his fine autobiography, "The Cold Blue Sky: A B-17 Gunner in World War Two." This is not just another wartime memoir, but a wonderful book written by a person interested in everything going on around him. More unusual, it is an enlisted man's point of view, which has not really been examined as well as it should have.

Novey explains how he got there and unabashedly speaks of his difficulty staying on flight status-not through any problems with training, but through airsickness. After completing flight training, Novey's crew was sent to England and arrived about a week after the 96th Bomb Group first set up shop at Snetterton Heath. Novey describes the people and places of wartime England, life on the base with its grim reality of ever-changing faces and those memorable passes to London.

His crew flew most of their missions in the B-17 Black Hawk. Novey had come up with the name, "... not for the Chicago Black Hawks, the hockey team, although I was from Chicago, but for the Blackhawk Indian tribe." At a time when long-range escort fighters were still only a dream, the crew participated in some of the 8th Air Force's most dangerous missions (including Regensburg and the second try at Schweinfurt). Jack Novey ultimately completed his required 25 missions even though statistics showed the odds were against the average crew member surviving even six. He was awarded the Air Medal, Distinguished Flying Cross and two Purple Hearts.

This is a remarkable story about the air war from one who was there. It is important that Jack Novey finally got to tell his story, since it opens up another little-known aspect of the European air war. Perhaps he says it best when he recalls, "We were all so young." Isn't that true of all warriors?