Publisher's Synopsis
The Allied campaign to drive Hitler's forces from North Africa, followed by the liberation of Sicily and then the major battles inching the front line northward up through Italy, are often overshadowed by the fight on the Western and Eastern fronts of WW2. Without the might of American's Army Air Forces being what it was, the final victory over Hitler in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (North Africa - Italy) might be questioned. The 12th Air Force brought the fight directly and decisively to the Germans. Under the 12th, the 57th Bombardment Wing and its mighty aggregation of aerial war machines literally drove the Nazis out of the skies and ran them into the ground in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The Battle of Brenner Pass was fought between American fighter jocks and bomber crews, taking on the German and Fascist ground forces with their colossal anti-aircraft armament - commonly called "flak." By this time the Luftwaffe (German air force) had been essentially suppressed in Italy, so flak was the No. 1 and deadly threat to the young American flyboys. The author's father was one of those flyboys, piloting a B-25J medium-bomber for 70 missions over Northern Italy, flying such Mitchell's named "Heaven Can Wait." Joe McFatter was one of the many heroes of the 321st Group, a native Texas boy from the hill country of the Great State, 6th generation son of pioneers. This book is about his life as one of America's Greatest Generation, a man who volunteered before Pearl Harbor. Entering the AAF, Joe did not really know what his military destiny was, but his aptitude and character qualified him for aviation cadet flying training. He found himself first being trained as a troop-carrier glider pilot, then answering the call to become a bomber pilot. In September, 1944 he and other men had their orders to fly a B-25 to North Africa, and thence he soon arrived on the "USS Corsica." The 12th had moved - one of many moves - from southern Italy to the island of Corsica in April that year, giving them a very strategic location for supporting the Allied landings on southern France, and then the terrible fight to liberate Italy. The 321st B-25 squadrons attacked German railroad and highway bridges, and munitions and fuel dumps and concentrations of troops relentlessly in the fall of '44 and through the spring of 1945 to Victory Europe Day. For his valor, Lt. McFatter was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with six Oak Leaf Clusters. He returned home in one piece to the girl he had married before going to war, taking her back to Texas, to become a rancher's wife. This book tells his life, and fulfills the author's dream of honoring his lifelong hero, his father. The story is not only about his father and the war, but is about one American family, a slice of Americana that along with millions and millions of other slices, makes up this wonderful experiment called the United States of America. While telling his father's story, the author also provides social context for the reader to consider, such as the dichotomy in race relations in America, with black military men and women going off to fight a war for freedom they did not enjoy back home, and the way Jews trying to flee the Nazis were treated, and the anti-Semitic attitudes of many of the Gentile soldiers that Jewish soldiers had to work with and fight alongside through the war. The author also ask the reader to not forget the internment of Japanese Americans in what were in effect, concentration camps, here at home. So in the author's viewpoint, while the Allies won the war, what was saved was this great laboratory experiment called America, still very much in the development stage in the year 2019.
