Samuel Russ Harris, Jr. (1902–1969)

I have read a lot of WWII memoirs, and most are either very polished or very technical. This book bridges the gap, as it consists of verbatim diary entries alternating with the bomb group's records.

The diary entries are blunt about personnel matters, how the general misses his wife, and the headaches of trying to run (part of) a war. The records trace the arrival and loss of planes, specifics of the planes themselves, and the details of missions.

The perspective of a senior staff officer is a nice contrast to the large number of WWI books by infantry officers & soldiers, pilots, and others on the sharp end of the war.

I found the diary entries very absorbing and very human, but the data of the other sections left me cold. On the whole, it was a book worth reading and I enjoyed it.… (meer)

If you wander through museums and look at the displays and wish you could have a conversation with the guys in the faded pictures - if you suspect there was all kinds of drama behind the heroism you so often hear about - and if you really like "inside baseball" and memoirs and (above all) the US military, you will love this book. I really love this book; I think ti's delightful. Bearing in mind that one of my favorite Saturday activities is to wander down to the US Air Force Museum at Wright-Pat in Dayton.

(I think this would be a good book to give to older high school students or college kids as part of a military history or American history course, by the way. It's a great view of what it really takes, in terms of human decision making and endurance and so forth, to make a military force happen. It also demonstrates how freaking boring, lonely, confusing, and frustrating war really is most of the time.)… (meer)

This is a nice change to the normal WWII diaries and memoirs as it is an uncensored collection of entries covering the air war in the Pacific from the point of view of a high level officer. As such, you don't get the dirt and horror of the infantry diaries but rather the command decisions and logistics burdens of a unit commander. While certainly not as griping as a front line solider's words, Harris was open and blunt in his view on all aspects of the war, making this a candid look at operation in the US Army Air Force. The narrative of the diary has been fleshed out by the inclusion of briefings, bombing reports, and other unit correspondence to provide an operation timeline by the editor. The reports and structure of the book can provide a challenge to the casual reader as the technical nature of the non-diary material is repetitiveness (military life on display) and not particularly engaging. The honest and gruff nature of Harris in his descriptions of the day-to-day are interesting and provide a distinct look at the war. The diary entries are worth the read though the book will probably be of greatest interest to fans of military history as opposed to those enjoy a more "pure" memoir.… (meer)