Serenade to the Big Bird

Without the Allies’ mastery of the skies—so hard fought for and won—there could have been no invasion, while the subsequent land battle was shaped by what happened in the air above. Air power was absolutely vital to Allied success. This is a memoir, rather than analysis, but it’s a really very fine one, and charts the progress of the American heavy bomber forces before, during, and after D-Day. Stiles is a brilliant writer—one gets the sense he’s writing it for himself, not an audience, and his reflections of life, the future, his crew, the surreal madness of having to clamber into a tin can to drop bombs on targets all over Europe, as well as the gut-wrenching violence he witnesses.

Stiles did not survive the war. He’s such a real person it seems impossible his short life could have been snuffed out later that year when he had switched from heavy bombers to the comparatively much safer single-engine fighters. And yet like the very best writing, it has allowed him to live on: a bright, imaginative, clever, witty, sensitive twenty-something caught up in something huge and violent in which he found himself inexorably trapped.