The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.
This website may use cookies to store information on your computer. Some help improve user experience and others are essential to site function. By using this website, you consent to the placement of these cookies and accept our privacy policy.Learn more.
Ted Fahrenwald flew P-47s and P-51s with the famed 352nd Fighter Group out of Bodney, England, during the critical tipping-point period of the air war over Europe. A classic devil-may-care fighter pilot, he was also a distinctively talented writer and correspondent. After a typical day of aerial combat and strafing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe – and of course, the requisite partying and creative mischief on base –Ted sat in his Nissen hut at a borrowed typewriter and composed exquisitely humorous letter-essays detailing his exploits in the air and on the ground to his family back home.
But they are not the mundane missives of a homesick young man who missed his mother’s cooking. Educated as a journalist, this incurably comedic pilot detailed his aerial exploits in a hilarious and self-effacing style that combines the vernacular of the day with flights of joyful imagination rivaling St. Exupery. And he didn’t sanitize his musings: Ted enthusiastically narrates the day-to-day rollercoaster ribaldry that was the natural M.O. of the young men who were tasked to kill Hitler’s Luftwaffe. His descriptions of near-constant drinking, skirt-chasing, gunplay, gambling, and out-and-out tomfoolery put the lie to the notion of the Greatest Generation as an earnest band of do-gooders.
These collected writings are more than literary entertainment: They are a boon to military and aviation historians and also to those who study period language and culture and the science of societies at war.