Wilmington author Kevin Maurer spins compelling WWII tale in true account 'Damn Lucky'
Former StarNews staff writer Kevin Maurer scored a New York Times best-seller co-authoring "No Easy Day," the memoir of the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden.
In "Damn Lucky" he tells a different true story: that of a young B-17 pilot in World War II who survived the deadly runs over Germany in 1943.
John "Lucky" Luckadoo was a college student in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Dreaming of aerial derring-do, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and tried to become a fighter pilot, but the Army needed pilots for its B-17 Flying Fortresses, which by 1943 were flying daylight raids over northern Europe.
Training was brisk and sometimes sketchy. Lucky barely had 60 hours of flying time when he guided his B-17 across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to England. (Technically, he was the co-pilot, but the pilot had disabled himself with a sexually transmitted disease and was barely able to climb in the cockpit.)
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A senior officer had told Lucky and his fellow trainees, "You're all going to be killed, and you might as well accept it." In the Air Corps, bomber crews were supposed to fly 25 missions before being sent home. In practice, few lasted more than five missions before they were shot down, killed or captured. (More than 20,000 U.S. airmen died over Europe.) Green bomber crews were being sent against veteran German fighter pilots, some of whom had been in combat since the Spanish Civil War. It was an uneven fight.
No one knew how strategic bombing worked. Generals like Curtis LeMay had to discover the rules as they went along, often at a cost of hundreds of lives.
The brass put its faith in the Norden bombsight, which was incredibly accurate under ideal conditions. Conditions, however, were never ideal. Walls of flak from anti-aircraft batteries surrounded German cities and factories. Waves of FW-190 fighters swooped on formations, hoping to pick off damaged planes. The B-17 carried a formidable battery of machine guns, but the Germans developed a tactic of diving on the bombers head-on from above — "Twelve o'clock high" in the gunners' phraseology.
There were other dangers. The B-17 was unheated and at operating altitudes of 26,000 feet, the temperature could reach -40 degrees. Crew members had electrically heated suits which worked somewhat, most of the time. Still, on one mission, Lucky developed severe frostbite in both feet after a piece of shrapnel shattered a plexiglass window.
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Spoiler: Luckadoo survived 25 missions. No wonder he was called "Lucky."
Maurer relied heavily on interviews with Luckadoo, who at press time was still alive and alert at the age of 99. (Luckadoo added a moving and patriotic afterword to the book.) His understated, just-the-facts style serves to underline the horrors and enormities of a bomber crewman's existence in the 1940s.
"Damn Lucky" is a must for military history and aviation buffs, as well as those who enjoyed Laura Hillenbrand's "Unbroken."
BOOK REVIEW
'DAMN LUCKY: One Man's Courage During the Bloodiest Military Campaign in Aviation History'
By Kevin Maurer
St. Martin's, $29.99
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Author Kevin Maurer spins compelling WWII tale in book 'Damn Lucky'
