Pitts, Jack. P-47 Pilot: Scared, Bored, & Deadly. San Antonio, TX: Pitts Enterprises, 1995.

250 pages
ISBN 0-9656793-0-6

Acknowledgments; Prologue; Introduction; Prelude; photos; tables; Epilogue; index of names; index of places.

When Jack Pitts arrived in Normandy in August 1944 as a replacement pilot for the 404th Squadron of the 371st Fighter Group, he began to keep a daily journal and a summary of each mission flown. After the war these remained locked away in a safe deposit box for almost fifty years, untouched and unread by anyone else, until his son read them and insisted that they should be annotated and turned into a book. The elder Pitts set to work doing so, and eventually completed this volume. Still he had no plans to publish until he showed the manuscript to an old 404th comrade who responded: "You ought to publish it. I've read lots of books that are worse than this."

So have I.

This is a genuine story of what the air war was really like for a P-47 pilot flying missions in the last nine months of the war in western Europe. The title says it all: scared, bored, and deadly.

The author's brief journal entries are individually fairly uneventful notations about the weather, minor illnesses, moving from one airfield to another, and shopping for souvenirs. Taken together and accompanied by his post-war notes, they give a clear picture of how the P-47 pilots lived their daily lives on the ground between missions, reminding us that not every waking moment was spent fighting the war or even thinking about it.

But on the same pages, interspersed between the pleasure of receiving a letter from home or a week of leave on the Riviera, is the heart of the book, the story of the job Pitts and the 371st were sent to France to do. He flew 90 combat missions before the war ended, typically dropping 500-pound bombs on bridges, enemy concentrations, and rail marshalling yards. Later he seemed to spend most of his time strafing airfields, individual locomotives, and columns of German horse-drawn transport. For each of the missions, his word-for-word wartime notes are reproduced, along with a fuller amplification and explanation which sometimes runs to a page or more.

Mission 83
11 APRIL 1945

I was loaned out to "B" Flight today and flew red three with Flaitz leading. We didn't see the sunrise until we had been on course for about ten minutes. A pretty early show. We bombed a train and I got a direct hit, starting a huge fire that burned a long time. Flaitz went down and strafed the loco and got him. He later got two more and then I went down on one and eight fifties really ripped him up and blew steam all over the place. Then I saw an airfield with several planes on it and Flaitz said I could take my element down on it. Conway and I dived out of the sun with water and I was clipping off about 450 on the deck as I went across. I was lined up on a JU-88 and he flamed very nicely. Then I saw a Focke-Wolf 190 right in front of me with a gas truck alongside. They both blew up with a very short squirt. We didn't see any flak so I went back for another pass, still on the deck with water. This time, I got a JU-88 which really blew up nice. I made my third and final pass the same way but my JU-88 didn't blow this time. Conway followed up on him and blew him OK though. We went back home figuring it was a very good mission.

By the time Pitts explains the jargon and what it takes to actually accomplish each one of these missions -- from details like "S" taxiing to arming bombs to airspeed indicators -- the reader may feel like he could actually climb into the cockpit and fly one of these babies.

A very nice job, and a perfect book for the aviation aficionado who likes to read first-hand accounts by the guys who drove these machines through the wild blue yonder.

Available by direct mail from Pitts Enterprises for $13.95.

Thanks to Jack Pitts for providing this review copy.