MOROTAI: A Memoir of War

Boeman, John

ISBN 10: 0385155867 / ISBN 13: 9780385155861

Published by Doubleday & Co., Garden City, 1981

About this Item

Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1981. First edition, as stated. harcover. Fine/very good. Octavo, 279 pages. Slight bit of soil on rear panel of dust jacket. 021210B.

Seller Inventory # 000013675

Bibliographic Details

• Title: MOROTAI: A Memoir of War
• Publisher: Doubleday & Co., Garden City
• Publication Date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385155867
• ISBN 13: 9780385155861
• Binding: harcover
• Edition: First edition, as stated
• Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

According to the official histories, says John Boeman, the U.S. Army trained 193,440 pilots between 1 July 1939 and 31 August 1945. Boeman was one of them -- a B-24 bomber pilot.

He had never been in an airplane, had never felt himself "born to fly," and felt "no sudden surge of patriotism." But from the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he says there was no question in his mind that he would enter military service. President Roosevelt's blueprint for total war made this clear.

Boeman's memoir takes the reader from flight training through combat missions.

The day-to-day life of inexperienced Boeman and his crew, as part of the 307th Bombardment Group, is detailed with humor and pathos -- the apprehension of his first mission; the long hours on the ground; the remembrances of "growing up"; the excitement, the "ice" in the stomach, or the unexpected.

". . . Significantly," Boeman says, "somewhere in the progression from my first day of training to . . . my fifth mission in combat operations, I had undergone an attitudinal transformation that compelled me to direct all effort toward a single objective: to put our bombs on the assigned target."

Boeman "ponders" the "rights and wrongs" of his responsibilities and decisions as an aircraft commander and works through the "agonizing postaccident days" of his aircraft's crash on takeoff, killing four of his crew.

Morotai is a thoughtful, touching remembrance of a survivor -- a story with excitement, and a story of pain.

From the Author

This book was conceived in the years following the author's retirement from the United States Air Force, written as a narrative to help the non-military, non-flying reader gains insight into the life and times of Army Air Forces combat crewmen, especially those who served in units such as the 307th Bombardment Group (H) in the Pacific theater.

The book was and is intended as the first of a series on the career of one military officer trained and employed as a pilot, first in World War II and subsequently in the quarter century of what many came to call the "Cold War" with those trying to bring into reality the doctrine stated in Karl Marx's 1848 Communist Manifesto that "Communists can only attain their ends by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions."

The objective is to provide greater opportunity for better understanding, on the part of those who elect our national leaders, of the need for all American citizens to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America and to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution -- to include the bearing of arms in its defense when called upon to do so according to its provisions -- to secure those blessings of liberty which it provides to ourselves and our posterity.