The Last Flight of Bomber 31: Harrowing Tales of American and Japanese Pilots Who Fought In World War II's Arctic Air Campaign - Hardcover

Colonel Ralph Wetterhahn (Ret.) is the author of The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War, about three marines captured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. He is widely read in Air & Space, Smithsonian, Popular Science, and Military Officer Magazine. During his career he flew 180 combat missions for the U.S. Air Force and Navy. He lives in Long Beach, California.

According to an old U.S. Coast Guard saying, the American-controlled Aleutian island of Attu is "not the end of the earth...but you can see it from there." Attu was attacked and briefly occupied by the Japanese during World War II, and the battle to win it back marked the beginning of the end for the seven-man crew of Bomber 31. Former Air Force Colonel Wetterhahn, a certified aircraft investigator and author (The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War), joined a forensics team in 2000, journeying to Kamchatka in the Russian tundra to investigate the crash site. Wetterhahn unravels the mystery of the crash while giving a full account of the air war in the Aleutians. He describes the various air battles with enough detail and enthusiasm to satisfy military aficionados, and his interviews with American and Japanese airmen give the story emotional weight. Many of the interviewees wound up in Russian POW camps as both air forces found it difficult to stay in the neutral territory mapped out by the 1941 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact. The stark recollections of the pilots who navigated above the fog, volcanoes and icy waters, and who encountered Soviet prisoners on their way to the gulags, are revealing and will fill readers with admiration for the pilots on both sides. As one B-25 copilot remembers, "Every time I looked at the water, I swallowed to keep my heart down. The water was just whipped to a froth by machine gun bullets, shell fragments, 20-mm slugs, and big stuff that was throwing up geysers." These vivid recollections, combined with Wetterhahn’s efficient writing and rigorous research, make this a gripping war chronicle. 85 photos.
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