As a follow-up on a rainy day, I'm not sure if I'll order this book:
It is part of a series and this book is massive. Which is great if you enjoy being flooded with information and you have strong wrists.
One thing both authors seem to miss, Charles Lindberg had volunteered to teach fighter pilots how to conserve fuel and cruise their aircraft when they weren't dog fighting. Lindberg was a civilian and a celebrity (and its also notable that he wasn't sent to the ETO
) but desperate times call for desperate measures and Lindberg was "embedded" with a P-38 squadron (and possibly an F-4U squadron) in the Pacific. It has been documented (but not proven) that Lindberg shot down one, and possibly two Japanese fighters, while he was training these squadrons.*
The higher-ups in these squadrons went ape when the reports of Lindy shooting down Zeros got to them. Lindberg was very much a civilian with
no chance of getting commissioned into military service due to his cozy relationship with the German government prior to the war.
Still, Lindberg's contribution to the war was massive and mostly undocumented. It was a case of the wrong guy being the right guy at the right time. Without his help, it would have been almost impossible to have P-38s and ,later, P-51s escort the bombers over Japan.
*- The book is titled Pacific Sweep by William N. Hess and tends to read like a hot mess. Hess does a very short intro in each chapter and then basically cuts and pastes after action reports (verbatim) by fighter pilots into the bulk of each chapter. This book is tough to find and was mostly sold as a cheap "throw away" paperback during the 1970's. While the background story is great, the delivery is very ham-handed.
