"McDonough brings such passionate perspective to this amazing and
heretofore largely unknown story that it's nearly impossible to put
down."
--James R. Hansen, prizewinning aerospace historian and bestselling
author of First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong
When Myron King of the U.S. Army Air Corps arrived in England in
1944, he fully expected to fly dangerous bombing missions over Nazi
Germany. What the twenty-three-year-old lieutenant had no way of
predicting, however, was that he would spend his last months in
Europe entangled in a bizarre affair born of the mounting tensions
between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ultimately, King
faced three wars: the monumental conflict between the Allies and
the Third Reich, the nascent Cold War, and a personal battle with
the military brass to clear his name after enduring a grossly
unjust court-martial.
This book presents an engrossing account of King's early life and
wartime service as part of the 401st Bombardment Group, U.S. Eighth
Air Force. As a child growing up in New York and Tennessee, he was
thoroughly captivated by the young field of aviation and dreamed of
becoming a pilot. Attending college when Pearl Harbor was attacked,
he realized his boyhood ambition by enlisting as an Air Corps
cadet. After completing flight training two years later, King and
his crew flew a B-17 bomber across the Atlantic to join their
fellow airmen at a base near the English village of
Deenethorpe--doing their first battle not with German fighters but
with a raging storm during the Greenland-to-Iceland leg of the
journey.
Once settled in Great Britain, the King Crew flew twenty missions
from November 1944 through February 1945. It was on their last
flight to Berlin that enemy fire crippled their plane and forced
them to land in Poland amid the Russian forces that were advancing
on Germany from the east. There events took a decidedly strange
turn as King became embroiled in an incident involving a young
stowaway and the increasingly complicated relations between the
United States and Stalin's regime. Scapegoated in the episode, King
would leave the Air Corps with his honorable record severely
soiled--a wrong that would take years to undo.
The Wars of Myron King is more than just a rattling good true-life
adventure story. Based on a wide array of published and primary
sources, including trial transcripts and interviews with King, the
book offers a unique view of the experience of air combat, the
intertwining of politics and military justice, and the complex
circumstances that inaugurated the Cold War.
James Lee McDonough is professor emeritus of history at Auburn
University. He is the author of ten books, including Shiloh--In
Hell Before Night, Stones River--Bloody Winter in Tennessee,
Chattanooga--A Death Grip on the Confederacy, War in Kentucky: From
Shiloh to Perryville, and Nashville: The Western Confederacy's
Final Gamble. This is his second book on a World War II
subject.
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