My father sat down to record his swashbuckling World War II adventure tale immediately after his discharge from the Army Air Corps in 1946. He finished about one year and many cartons of cigarettes later, and then the manuscript sat on a shelf for decades, known only to family and friends. Dad didn’t pursue the career in journalism that he’d dreamed of as a young college man; instead, he had a family and with his brother Fran operated a small steel mill inherited from their father. This book is a tribute to my Dad: his humor, his over-the-top love of life, and especially his unacknowledged artistic talents as a writer, storyteller, and artist. Everyone who’s read the manuscript has insisted that it must be published, and I decided to do that, nearly seventy years after the events he describes and seven years after his death in 2005.
Dad’s father was the archetypal “Indiana Jones”—born in a sod house in South Dakota, he grew up to become an all-around outdoorsman, an inventor with nearly 200 patents to his name, and a mining engineer who explored mines from Alaska to South America. Raised by two Northern Plains romantics on the family ranch and in Chicago, Dad was a member of the last generation to straddle the great American Frontier and the modern era.
He grew up hunting, fishing, camping, and traveling with his father, and already had his commercial pilot’s license and was an avid flyer, motorcyclist, and full-fledged daredevil when he enlisted at age 22 determined to become a combat fighter pilot. With its reputation for attracting hot-shots and risk-takers, that role was custom-made for him. Dad’s trickster personality and comedic skills enabled him and his cohort to prank and party their way through every stage, from basic training in California to pilot training in Arizona to combat assignment in England. Those qualities enabled Dad to not just survive but also to thrive in his relationship with the backwoods French Resistance outlaws he fought and partied with—and also during his internment and escape from a German POW camp.
I thought it important to preserve the integrity of Dad’s vernacular. As “unpolitically correct” as it might read these days, that was the jargon of the WWII-era flyboy; for that reason, I kept the manuscript exactly as it was written, with very little editing.
I believe that you’ll find this wild ride back in time to another place and another era to be an irresistible read—and that you’ll also enjoy getting acquainted with some of the more rambunctious members of “The Greatest Generation.”
—Madelaine Fahrenwald