The Big War II: One Kid's War --B for Buster

As a small child I was always fascinated with accounts of the air war during World War II. My uncle told stories of the days when as a ground crew chief he was expected to fly every fifth mission over the English Channel as "those old slow Liberators" dropped their bombs on German cities. "The flak was so thick you coulda walked on it," he'd say, "and there I was, sittin' there on an empty ammo box, just along for the ride, without even a gun to shoot back at the German fighters as they came up at us." One day he found himself so overwhelmed with the meaninglessness of it all that he decided he wasn't going to make those qualifying missions any more. He lost some stripes, but, unlike most of his group, he lived to tell the tale.

Iain Lawrence's B for Buster tells the story of sixteen-year-old Kak (nicknamed for his Canadian hometown Kakabeca) who falsifies his age and becomes a wireless operator on the night-bombing Halifaxes flying raids into the heart of Germany in 1943. Fleeing an alcoholic father, Kak is in love with the physical joy of flight and filled with romantic dreams of medals and postwar adulation until he flies his first "op" (mission) and realizes that he has little chance of surviving the thirty-op tour of duty in his flak-riddled, patched-up bomber, "B for Buster." Donny, an older hometown friend in the same unit, urges Kak to tell his C.O. that he is underage while he can still muster out without the stigma of LMF (lack of moral fiber) attached to a RAF airman who becomes too fearful to fly, but Kak is more afraid of humiliation than of the terrors of the night flights that follow.

Kak goes on to fly his thirty ops and to see many horrors, growing more terrified with each grisly sight. His crew members try to hide their own fears as each clings to a lucky charm or talisman to keep them safe. Nothing helps Kak's overwhelming fear, however, until he becomes friends with the unit's pigeoneer, a corpsman whose job it is to care for the homing pigeons that fly with the crews on each mission. Kak becomes convinced that only one special pigeon has the power to keep him alive, and his crew soon comes to share his belief. Kak's coming-of-age is one that no sixteen-year-old should have to live through, but it is an engrossing and emotional experience to share with this character.

Lawrence's descripion of bombing runs over Dusseldorf, Peenemunde, and Berlin itself are so realistic that I felt I was listening to my uncle's war stories all over again. Anyone interested in the British air operations in World War II will find this book almost impossible to lay down and just as hard to forget.

An author's note on the role of homing pigeons in World War II is appended, as well as a glossary of Royal Air Force slang. Both provide interesting fare for the World War II buff.