Fast Missions

Historian and aviator Jay Stout follows up his spellbinding account of the U.S. 303rd Bomb Group--Hell’s Angels--with the equally remarkable story of the Air Apaches in the Pacific. Air Apaches reconstructs the war of the 345th Bomb Group in impressively painstaking detail, capturing what it was like to be one of the young men flying low-level bombing and strafing missions and--if the missions weren’t dangerous enough--facing such challenges as kamikaze attacks and, if a pilot was shot down, primitive jungle conditions and a sword-brandishing enemy who did not treat downed airmen by the letter of the Geneva Convention. Air Apaches is more than the story of one unit in aerial combat in World War II. It is the story of men at war across all of history.

Jay A. Stout is a retired Marine Corps fighter pilot with more than 4,500 flight hours and 37 combat missions during Operation Desert Storm. He has appeared as an aviation and military expert on various TV and radio news programs, including Fox News and NPR. He is the author, among other books, of Hell’s Angels: The True Story of the 303rd Bomb Group in World War II, Fighter Group: The 352nd ＂Blue-Nosed Bastards＂ in World War II, and The Men Who Killed the Luftwaffe: The U.S. Army Air Forces against Germany in World War II. He lives in San Diego, California.