e-Book Fatal Army Air Forces Aviation Accidents in the United States, 1941-1945 (3 Volume Set) download

I was told by the author several years ago to expect this book. After many delays it is finally available and I might add, worth the wait. My comments are not meant to be cliche. This is one monumental three volume work whose meticulous research was the reason for its delay in being published.

Thousands of military aircraft were lost within the United States during WWII by all three services plus the Coast Guard. Many of us in the search and rescue business have seen the numerous wrecks that are scattered throughout the West as we go about our business looking for other missing aircraft. Like the author, I always wondered about the circumstances of these crashes which, by the 1970s, were long forgotten to history except by those few who remembered them.

Accident reports filed by the military services detail these incidents and their causes. But these reports are available only to the few of us who specialize in researching crash sites or who can afford to buy them. The author has taken these thousands of accident reports from the WWII US Army Air Forces, identified the 6,300 or so fatal ones, and have summarized them into this three volume set. Reading them is fascinating. Some examples include:

- The young navigator who disappeared from a B-24 while on a night, over water navigation training mission. Last seen headed for the rear of the aircraft, there is no evidence that he jumped since none of the aircraft's hatches or exits were opened during the flight. He simply vanished.

- The tragic accident in 1943 involving the CG-4 Glider which crashed during a demonstration flight due to structural failure. Among those killed was the Mayor of St Louis, MO, his city comptroller, the local Chamber of Commerce President as well as the two man crew and the officer in charge of the Army's Glider Procurement Program. The investigation found that the company who produced the glider did not follow the aircraft specifications which resulted in a wing strut to fail. The tragic irony, is that both the President and Vice President of the company who made the glider were also killed in the same crash.

- The numerous aicraft that were not found until many years after the war. They include the missing P-40 in California in 1941 that was not found until 1959, the two B-24s that disappeared over California the same night in 1943 and were not found until 1955 and 1960. The UC-78 that vanished in Arizona and not found until 1974. The most recent find is the P-38 lost in 1942 and not found until Sep 1997 in Washington State. At the back of Volume III is a list of about 75 USAAF aircraft that have still not been found.

- While many of the accidents were the result of the realistic training necessary to prepare aircrews for combat, some of incidents epitomize what the author calls the senseless carelessness that also kill people when you're training for war. The numerous unauthorized "dogfights" that ended in tragedy, the numerous crewmen who simply walked into moving propellors, the fatal misjudgements about weather, aircraft performance and navigation that pilots make even to this day.

Aside from sifting through all the reports, the author attempted to run down resolution of the numerous missing aircraft that were not found until well after the war ended. The USAAF attempted to up date or complete their accident reports as new leads came in or when planes were finally found. However, it seems that when the U.S. Air Force came into existance in 1947, these updates stopped. As much as possible, the author provides closure information on the aircraft found well after the war ended.

I now have a fuller understanding for the older military pilots I flew SAR with back in the 1970s. It seemed to me that they understood the concept of "safety" as just another word. That was because they grew up in an air force where pilots and aircraft were expendable and accidents were the "cost" of the dangerous business of flying.

One thing this book does not do is that it does not give you Lat/Long locations for these crash sites. It does not provide a current status of the crash site. He does not list the incidents by the original accident report numbers, but by his own tracking system as explained in Volume I. Neither does it list any fatal crashes for the other services unless it involved a USAAF aircraft. In addition, it only covers fatal accidents within the Continental U.S. It does not cover accidents in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico nor the rest of the Americas, such as Canada, Mexico and Latin America.

I forwarned the author that despite his intense research, he must be prepared for corrections and additional information. He has already made provisions for this on his website as listed in Volume I.

For the historian of WWII aviation as well as those of us who are serious in researching military crash sites, this book is a must for your library. Despite it's high price, this well researched and well written book stands heads and shoulders above similar books and is a must have. My hope now is that the author will now turn his attention to fatal aircraft accidents for the other services. And maybe one for all the non-fatal USAAF accidents. In whatever he decides to do, if he maintains the same high standard of research and accuracy he will produce another must have book.

This 3-volume set is an encyclopedic resource. It summarizes the reports from fatal accidents that occurred within the USA under the Army Air Force purveyance during World War II years of 1941-1945. I purchased this set to search for stories about my own father's AAF unit and see if any of the reports about his old unit make mention of him. While the indices are thorough, there is none that lists reports by AAF unit number. Nonetheless, this set would be worthwhile for the shelves of historians looking for a different view of the war years. Army Air Force personnel lost lives not just at the fronts. It is a part of WWII history often overlooked.

Clearly a labor of love. You have to be deeply interested in the subject to get anything out of the author's effort here, but if you are, it's an unmatched resource.

This book is not for the General aviation historian nor is it written for the specific WWII Aviation Historian - The author seems to have missed the mark in writing this book....

The book is a disappointment on many levels - while the author has summerized the fatal accident reports for the WWII time period he left out details that would help the aviation historian. Details such as aircraft markings, units assigned to, exact location of crash all have been left out. To make the book even more difficult to use, to find out exactly which aircraft was involved in a summery, you have to go to book three and tediously search each reference for a specific aircraft to track down the aircraft serial number - this could have easily been placed in the summery.

No photos at all

For a 200.00 book it was printed on cheap paper, no slip case - this information could easily have been done on a CD in a searchable format...

It would be cheaper, more informative to order the microfilm of the accident reports

I am both a very experienced pilot and student of WW2 with two uncles who were Army Air force multi engine pilots in the entire Pacific theater who survived; they were and are my heroes and gave me my passion for aviation.

To put this book in context in WW2 the Army trained over 550k pilots while the Navy did the same with 80k. In WW2 120k airmen lost their lives but only 40k of that total were in combat; the rest in training and operational flights all over the world so only one third died in combat. This book focuses on only those who died in the CONTUS and reflects the cross section of root causes worldwide I'm sure which had a high concentration of mid air collisions, weather events, and sheer inexperience of the pilots learning their trade for it was a Darwinian system mandated by war that quickly sorted out those who were competent pilots and those who were not.

You must also remember there were only limited simulators available and no computer or video instruction available to these men and when they took off in a single engine fighter it was their first solo in type. Weather information was primitive compared to today's real time video and analysis available through many medias. There is one event that this called the Naper 28 [...] which was a C47 flying 28 trained P47 pilots and their flight surgeon who flew along a thunderstorm front and then penetrated it with fatal results for all on board just before deploying to Europe in 1944. The human waste of war is so evident in this book and this incident when you learn the flight surgeon was a prodigy who graduated from med school at 21.

Another accident was the B25 that crashed into the Empire state building in July 45 which I witnessed after as a child and on Aug 6 the Ira Bong accident in a P80 off Burbank that killed the greatest ace just as Hiroshima was atom bombed; how ironic.

If you fit the above profile you will not be able to put this book down as a testament to those who gave their lives for us and the imperfect training they endured to make us safe................