THE WILD BLUE; by Stephen E. Ambrose; Simon & Schuster, 299 pages; $26.
Ironically, when Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota ran as the Democratic nominee for president in 1972 against Richard Nixon, the Republican incumbent, no one knew the senator was a war hero.
Stephen Ambrose, the prolific historian who authored this volume, says, "Nixon was a supply officer who never heard a shot fired in anger, never saw a dead body." Even so, Nixon trounced McGovern for re-election when the paramount national issue was the validity of the controversial Vietnam War.
Yet McGovern never brought up his own World War II service record to make himself a more attractive candidate. McGovern, 79, who is now serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization with headquarters in Rome, explained, "I didn't want to boast about what I did in the past. I wanted to talk about what I would do in the future."
Now Ambrose has set the record straight by writing this book, subtitled "The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany." Though it began as McGovern's personal story, Ambrose expanded it to include all the members of McGovern's crew. They were young, mostly between the ages of 18 and 22, and they flew a B-24 bomber named "The Dakota Queen." Most were gunners, radio men, bombardiers, flight engineers or navigators.
McGovern flew 35 missions and won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his work.
As Ambrose writes, "The B-24 was built like a 1930s Mack truck, except that it had an aluminum skin that could be cut with a knife. It could carry a heavy load far and fast, but it had no refinements. Steering the four-engine airplane was difficult and exhausting, as there was no power except the pilot's muscles. It had no windshield wipers, so the pilot had to stick his head out the side window to see during a rain. Breathing was possible only by wearing an oxygen mask — cold and clammy, smelling of rubber and sweat — above 10,000 feet in altitude."
Most members of the crew said they were so young and they knew so little, that they just did what McGovern told them to do. McGovern, himself only 22, said, "The members of my crew were boys when we entered combat. They emerged as serious men."
McGovern had a snapshot taken of him and his plane, then before sending it to his wife, he wrote on the back, "The best B-24 pilot in the world." That was only a joke. McGovern told Ambrose about a number of other pilots who were better than he was, partly because they were athletes before the war.
On his last mission, in April of 1945, McGovern and his crew endured considerable damage before being forced to ditch or try to land on the runway. He gave his crew the opportunity to bail out, but they chose to stay with him.
One engine was out, the brakes were gone, and the plane was low on gas. He came in too high because of his fear of falling short of the field. At the end of the runway, the plane's nose plunged into a ditch. Then it started up on the other side, the tail went up, then crashed down.
"It wasn't one of my better landings," said McGovern. "It was too hot. I came in too fast. But I didn't want to take any chance on stalling out. I wanted to make sure that we got that plane on the ground without any screwup. If I ever made that landing again, I would have made it slower."
Everyone got out OK. The plane had 110 holes in the fuselage and wings. McGovern said, "I couldn't believe it. If you had looked at that airplane, you would not have known how it stayed in the air."
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