General Leemy’s Circus: A Navigator’s Story Of The Twentieth Air Force In World War II [Illustrated Edition]

Includes The Bombing Of Japan During World War II illustrations pack with 120 maps, plans, and photos

THIS IS the dramatic, uninhibited account of the human side of the air war in the Pacific and of the men who flew the Superforts, the B-29s of General Curtis LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command, straight to the heart of Japan.

Earl Snyder was a navigator on the B-29 Umbriago-Dat’s My Boy, and took part in the first B-29 raid on Tokyo. But, he recalls nervously, his crew didn’t drop their bombs on the Japanese capital, because at 29,000 feet the air was so cold that the bomb-release mechanism had frozen. “Umbriago” made it back to the base at Saipan with the fuel gauges registering “less than empty.”

This is not a biography of General LeMay—or “General Leemy,” as the Japs called him—it’s the story of the airmen who carried out his orders, flew the missions and lived or died without asking “too many questions.”

General Leemy’s Circus is a tribute to those men and, at the same time, an exciting record of their everyday lives. Writing with stark realism, Snyder hands the reader a share of the dangers and thrills, the devil-may-care, sometimes hilarious, adventures of men without women, and of the sordidness and the glory of air war.