During World War II, some 10,000 American bombers and fighters were
shot down over Europe. Of the crews aboard, 26,000 men were killed,
while 30,000 survived being shot down only to be captured and made
prisoners of war. Against the longest of odds, nearly 3,000 airmen
made it to the ground alive, evaded capture, and escaped to safety.
These men proudly called themselves the Blister Club. Drawing on
tens of thousands of pages of mostly untapped documents in the
National Archives, Michael Lee Lanning tells the story of these
courageous airmen. They had received escape-and-evasion (E & E)
training, and some were lucky enough to land with their E-&-E
kits-but all bets were off once they hit the ground. They landed
after an air catastrophe. The geography was usually unfamiliar.
Civilians might or might not be trustworthy. German soldiers and
Gestapo agents hunted down airmen as well as civilians who dared
help them. If an airman abandoned his uniform for civilian garb, he
forfeited Geneva Convention protections. Most faced the daunting
task of escaping on foot across hundreds of miles. The fortunate
connected with one of the established escape routes to Spain or
Switzerland or across the English Channel, or they hooked up with
the underground resistance or friendly civilians. Upon return to
friendly lines, these men were often able to provide valuable
intelligence about enemy troop dispositions and civilian morale.
Many volunteered to fly again even though regulations prohibited
it. The Blister Club is history with a punch. With a historian's
eye, Lanning covers the hows and whys of escape-and-evasion and
aerial combat in the European theater, but the book also vividly
captures the stories of the airmen who did the escaping and
evading, including that of a young pilot named Chuck Yeager, who,
during his own escape, aided the French Resistance and helped
another downed airman to safety-and then begged to fly again,
eventually securing Eisenhower's approval to return to the air,
where he achieved ace status. Stories of escape are popular,
especially those set during World War II, as are stories of the war
in the air. Combining both of these, The Blister Club should find
an enthusiastic audience.
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