Half a Wing, Three Engines and a Prayer

Paperback - 30 April, 1999 - McGraw-Hill Professional
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By: Brian D O'Neill
ISBN: 0071341455

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Reviews by readers

A great read...

This book is highly informative. My father, a B-17 Bombardier in the 8th Air Force apprecitated the authenticity of this book. Well written without the Hollywood fluff.

A Classic.

Whether this is your introduction to daylight bomber operations over Europe, or you've read hundreds of accounts, Half a Wing, Three Engines and a Prayer will not disappoint. What really sets this book apart from a typical account, is that O'Neill has managed to get the entire crew's recollections mission by mission. Each individual's perspective is different, and taken as a whole provides a remarkably complete picture of life on a B-17 crew during the most intense period of air combat in the ETO. You will be hard pressed to find a better book on the subject.

I used this as my book report on it

Half a Wing, Three Engines, and a Prayer , written by Brian O'Neal, is the historical account of a B-17 Bomb Wing in Europe during the Second World War. Though many crews and other wings are followed in the book, the central story is that of the 303rd "Hell's Angels" Bomb Group and the B-17 crew of Lt. Bob Hullar. The period covered is from training in 1942 to combat over Europe from 1943 to 1944.

Though several previous histories of Air Combat in World War II had been written, few had given the full perspective of the individual bomber crew. For B-17s, this consisted of 10 men, 3 of whom were officers and the rest enlisted. Together they flew the airplane, operated navigation instruments and radios, sighted and dropped the payload, and used machine guns to fend off attacks from enemy aircraft along the way. Often noted by the book was the fact that nearly 25% of these air crews would never return from the European Theater of Operations.

The crews of the 303rd Bomb Group began their training for the most part in 1942, following the American entry into World War II. These men came from all walks of life and trained at bases all across the country before being assembled at a base in Washington for their final phase of training, where they trained as the crew they'd be a part of in Europe. From there, they were sent to England, where the 303rd was based as part of the strategic bombing campaign of the 8th Air Force against occupied Europe and Nazi Germany. The Group operated the four-engined B-17 "Flying Fortress", and crews typically flew different airplanes during their tour in Europe, which required 25 missions to be completed. Bob Hullar's crew would fly no less than 10 different aircraft during their tour, several of which were later destroyed, rendered irreparable by damage, and one of which had to be ditched in the English Channel.

O'Neal relied heavily on interviews from members of the crews, particularly that of Bob Hullar. Each chapter of the book is devoted to a mission flown during the Hullar crew's tour, their targets ranging from coastal towns in France to large industrial cities deep in the heart of Germany. Likewise, the missions varied from somewhat un-remarkable to enormous aerial battles and fierce anti-aircraft fire. Regardless of the target, however, every mission posed extraordinary danger to the crews who flew on them. They remained in constant fear of their own destruction, and this perhaps played a role in how well the individual crew members could remember the particulars of each mission decades after it occurred. When events could not be correlated with the accounts of the crew's, O'Neal turned to the official records of the 303rd Bomb Group and even those of the German Luftwaffe to determine what actually occurred during the air battles documented in the book.

The story of the American Amry Air Force in Europe was first made famous by the story of the crew of the Memphis Belle, which was the first B-17 to complete 25 missions and served as the platform for a now famous documentary on the subject, made during the war. Since that time numerous documentaries and books have been produced on the subject, making it one of the more well understood aspects of the war in Europe.

Overall, one learns a great deal from the individual accounts that are contained in the book. They give an eye-witness view to the carnage and fast-paced action that occurred thousands of feet above the earth during the air war, and offer a glimpse into how it actually felt to be caught in the middle of this. One is surprised to learn the ineffectiveness that often plagued American bombing missions, which frequently missed their intended target or did little damage, despite the involvement of hundreds of airplanes for each mission. At times there were well over a thousand aircraft, both bombers and fighters, engaged in accomplishing these missions. The crew of Bob Hullar , one finds out, was lucky to survive the slaughter that took place at 25,000 feet on an almost daily basis, and the story of the air war in Half a Wing, Three Engines, and a Prayer is forever memorable because of it.