Tidal Wave: The Pilots, the Princess, and the Enemy Ace - A True Story of Courage and Survival in WWII

From the author of the New York Times bestsellers A Higher Call, Spearhead, and Devotion comes an astonishing true story set in an untold arena of World War II.

“Tidal Wave is epic in every way. Like all good WWII books, it reminds us again, in the starkest terms possible, how much we owe to those who won that war.”—Daniel James Brown, author of The Boys in the Boat

It’s summer 1943, and the world is on fire.

Lieutenant Ernie Poulson, a twenty-two-year-old outdoorsman from Utah, finds himself at the controls of America’s most advanced bomber, the B-24, brought to North Africa for a top-secret mission.

On the far side of Europe, Lieutenant Constantin Cantacuzino, Romania’s most daring ace, duels Soviet fighters on the Eastern Front while searching for purpose in an unwinnable war.

In Nazi-aligned Romania, Princess Catherine Caradja walks a perilous line between loyalty to her country and quiet defiance, as German forces dig in around the oil refineries in her backyard.

And in the royal palace, twenty-one-year-old King Michael of Romania—mocked and sidelined by a Nazi-backed dictator—quietly plots to seize his nation’s destiny before it is lost forever.

In Tidal Wave, Adam Makos brings these lives together in a sweeping saga of courage and survival, set against history’s most audacious air raid: the treetop assault on “Hitler’s gas station” at Ploesti, Romania. What begins in flames on August 1, 1943, sparks bonds no one could have foreseen—alliances between enemies—that will decide whether these men and women are consumed by war, or seize their chance at escape and redemption.

Drawn from years of extensive research and told with Makos’s signature cinematic intensity, Tidal Wave will remind you that even in war’s darkest hours, humanity has a way of breaking through.

Hailed by the Associated Press as “a masterful storyteller,” Adam Makos is the New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Call, Spearhead, and Devotion—now a major motion picture starring Glen Powell. Inspired by his grandfathers’ service, Makos crafts unforgettable stories of America’s veterans, blending raw human drama with vivid, close-up military action. The Los Angeles Times places him “in the top ranks of military writers,” a title earned through immersive research that has taken him from flying a World War II bomber to embedding on a Special Forces raid in Iraq and even journeying into North Korea in search of a missing American aviator.