The Big War: The Last Mission by Harry Mazer

When 15-year-old Jack Raab's older brother fails his physical for the draft, Jack feels that it is his duty to uphold his Jewish family's honor by entering the war to defeat Hitler. Using his brother's birth certificate, Jack conceals his real age and fakes his way through flight training. Despite being underage, he manages to to qualify as a waist gunner in a B-17 crew assigned to fly missions against Germany in the last year of World War II.

Filled at first with heroic dreams of becoming a fighter pilot ace, Jack finds flying missions over Europe terrifying for himself and the rest of his young crew. In their twenty-fifth mission, their B-17 is badly damaged and ditches in the North Sea near the English coast. Picked up by British sailors, the crew is immediately re-assigned to a new aircraft and takes off for a bombing run over Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. In a horrifying scene over their target, the plane suffers a direct hit and Jack sees his best friend killed and the others scrambling to bail out.

Jack follows and is the only crew member to survive ground fire and land safely. Injured and frightened, he hides for several days before being taken prisoner by a ragtag group of disheartened Luftwaffe airmen. Jack is suddenly freed when the disorganized German army flees before the advancing Russians and eventually makes his way back to the American lines. When Jack is rotated back to the States and reassigned to the Pacific theatre, he finally decides to reveal his true age, now sixteen, and goes back home to begin his adjustment to civilian life as a high school student again.

As always, Harry Mazer's writing is taut, packs plenty of action, and sticks to the main story line without digression. Readers who are fascinated with the bombers which dominated the air war in Europe will enjoy reading The Last Mission, in tandem with Iain Lawrence's B for Buster reviewed here on April 6.

For serious World War II buffs, The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945, the companion book to Ken Burns' soon-to-be-aired PBS documentary, is now available. This book deals with "the necessary war," not from the point of view of leaders and campaigns, but from the intimate accounts of over forty people who describe their own personal experiences, from prisoner-of-war camps, the air war, the home front, and the slog war of grunts in the Pacific theatre. First-person narratives and original photographs should bring The War home to those generations who did not experience it in person.