Pilot Gordon Bennett Robertson Jr.’s first fire-bomb run over Tokyo in March, 1945 took him through boiling thermals produced by the burning city about 5,000 feet below. They bounced his B-29 up and down and then flipped the sixty-ton bomber onto its back. He was able to recover only through a Split-S maneuver he’d practiced flying fighters in training.
And so it goes through thirty-five missions over the Japanese Empire in Robertson’s always tense, sometimes thrilling 270-page memoir which kept me up late finishing it over several nights. I’ve long had a special interest in the B-29, but never before felt that I was on the flight deck with the pilots in their helmets and flak suits threading their way through blinding search-light beams and a hail of shrapnel from anti-aircraft bursts.
Robertson, president of the 29th Bomb Group’s reunion association, helped put it to rest last year after twenty-two years because the surviving membership is getting too old to cope with it any more. Their memorabilia is on display where most of them first met the big bomber, in a museum at their old training field in Pratt, Kansas. But this book surely will live on, a testament to the young men who flew the big silver birds that finally helped bring Imperial Japan to its knees.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
