Serenade to the Big Bird [Illustrated]: The Memoir of a Mighty Eighth Air Force B-17 Pilot

Newly illustrated with 36 contemporary colour & black & white photographs, this classic WW2 memoir, published by Spitfire Publishers in November 2018, also includes an invaluable glossary of 8th Air Force slang

“I was tense and drawn taut. The sky was cold and beautifully aloof. I saw some black puffs and a couple of bright bursts… Jesus, we’re in the flak already, I thought. Then the guns opened up. Every gun on the ship opened up. A black Focke-Wulf slid under our wing, and rolled over low. Fear was hot in my throat and cold in my stomach. ‘Here they come.’ It was Mock, I think, cool and easy, like in a church. Then his guns fired steadily. The air was nothing but black polka dots and firecrackers from the 20-millimeters…”

Ten men, thirteen M2 Browning machine guns, & 4,000 lbs of bombs, the B-17 (the ‘Big Bird’) lived up to it’s nickname – Flying Fortress. Birt Stiles was one of those young men, flying in one of the thousands of B-17 heavy bombers of the USAAF ‘Mighty Eighth’ Air Force, on daylight raids deep into the Third Reich from the flat, green fields of Eastern England.

A gifted writer & brave co-pilot, in SERENADE TO THE BIG BIRD, Birt recounts his harrowing experiences of flying day-after-day through intense anti-aircraft fire and swarms of Luftwaffe fighters during 1944 at the height of the American daylight bomber offensive. This is a haunting memoir: amusing, ineffably sad, & brutally honest about the author’s emotions.

His crew was part of the 91st Bomb Group, ‘the Ragged Irregulars’ a leading unit of Eighth Air Force, made famous by the MEMPHIS BELLE, & infamous for suffering the greatest number of losses of any heavy bomb group in World War II.

Bert Stiles was born in Denver, Colorado in 1920. He studied at Colorado Colleg

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Author: Stiles, Bert

Binding: Kindle Edition

Format: Kindle eBook

Number Of Pages: 192

Release Date: 25-11-2018

Languages: English