In my last post, I reviewed “Masters of the Air,” concerning the latest offering by Spielberg and Hanks in regard to the air war over Europe by the USAAF’s 8th AF. If you haven’t seen the review, it’s below this post.

It made me think of a connection I have to that bloody campaign, which ended the lives of many thousands of Allied airmen, Germans, and others. The guilty, and the innocent.

There was no one, as best I know, in my immediate family who served in those bomber streams. No, we sucked it through the steamy jungles and shitty islands in the Pacific for the most part. A few were in Europe, but once again, no one flew. Everyone walked. On a great day, they hitched rides.

But there was a little Frisian girl who lived on a small farm in Holland who saw that campaign. Her village had the misfortune to be fairly close to a large German airbase, about 46 km in a straight line. This was a few minutes flying for a fighter. The drone of the machines overhead, the massive banks of contrails, the thunder at night. Sometimes flashes, or brilliant streaks of fire. These were parts of her day-to-day life.

On a day in July of 1942, there was a tremendous crash and fire in the fields behind her house. Everyone went and looked- an Allied bomber was smashed up in a smoking ruin, black smoke choked the area, the flames roared higher than her house. Chunks of the fallen aircraft were strewn about; everyone knew the Germans would be there soon.

The villagers weren’t wrong. The Wehrmacht, or more likely the Luftwaffe, showed up in force and cordoned off the crash site. They took what weapons they could find and any parts of the aircraft that might be useful for intelligence. The rest they left for the villagers to deal with. By the way, the penalty for taking weapons, if the villagers cared to do so, was summary execution. The Germans made that clear.

The villagers laid the dead airmen to rest. These were their graves, shortly after burial, in 1942. As you can see, the villagers didn’t just dump them into a hole.

My Mother in Law, now an old lady, thought it important to show me these graves when I visited in 2017. These airmen lay there still, amongst the villagers who buried them. Mem’s little sister, Margje Postma, lays but a few meters away, dead in 1955 of leukemia. The four white stones hold pride of place at the back of the cemetery, meticulously maintained by the descendants of the people who watched them die.

The cost was real. The living memories remain.

In the bleak winter of 1944/45, she was nearly killed as she rode her bicycle, part of that same air campaign. She crossed a bridge and heard a roar, a fighter-bomber blew the bridge behind her sky high. Germans searched the village for Resistance fighters, collaborators snitched people out. They disappeared, many never to return. Eventually, the cruel winter ended, and she watched the Wehrmacht go home, either on stolen bicycles or on foot. The killing didn’t stop until the last soldier left, in the second week of May, 1945.

Canadian soldiers eventually reached her village. The eight-year-old’s war was finally over, and she never saw a bomber again.

In 2024, however, if asked— she hears them still.

This. This was the air war.

As a military-fascinated kid growing up, I remember there was an illustrated book about World War Two that was kept in pride-of-place on my Grandma’s coffee table. It had been published shortly after the war, and if you think the public was spared graphic images from that conflict, you would be mistaken. I’d imagine it was there because the war had an enormous impact on my family. Many fought, their lives altered for good.

Some pictures I remember were of B-17’s, horribly mangled in aerial combat, who had made it back to England and were thus photographed. As a child, I thought, “How did these airplanes still fly?” I didn’t know then, and I still don’t. Those lucky birds should have disintegrated, their crews tossed into the slipstream. Unfortunately, that also happened, and seventy-three percent of the aircrewmen of the 8th Air Force became casualties, dead or wounded.

It is a testament to the crews, builders, designers, and maintainers that any of these birds made it back to their home stations in England after missions over the continent.

With this in mind, I decided to risk watching the initial episodes of the new Apple TV series, “Masters of the Air.”

You can see the trailer here.

I’m glad I overcame my inner resistance to seeing this; the first two episodes were very good. If you’d like, you could give it a try.

I had a number of reservations, and there were things I watched out for while viewing the programming. The first two series of Spielberg’s WW2 trilogy were outstanding. Those were “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” While Band of Brothers was very good, I preferred “The Pacific.” The latter series, I thought, did a better job of showing some of the effects of combat on ordinary people; this is an infrequently told tale. In my opinion, it’s the most important part of the story.

How do you live with yourself, when you thought you would die, but then you did not? When later you must face what you did? This is an important question.

With trepidation, I watched. I was alert for jingoism, platitudes, and cliches. I’m allergic to those things.

Fortunately, these flaws were low-key so far, except for a general reverence for our ancestors, who suffered so much.

While I don’t know what it’s like to be in a bomber that is falling apart, I do know something about fear. These men, the real 8th AF guys who flew and the actors who played them, were frightened, and the show does a good job with this. It shows regular people who are caught up in horror. It shows the price of clean sheets and good food. It shows how normal people will do stupid things and behave badly under duress, both in combat and in the terrible pauses between missions.

Any combat veteran will tell you the anticipation and the waiting are the worst. The rest is just doing your job.

Regarding the show itself, the best scene, carefully crafted and an experience to behold, is a crash-landing in Scotland. I’m curious if others who see this think the same.

Go ahead. Give it a watch, and thank your lucky stars that you didn’t fly with the Mighty Eighth.

FYI- The Storyteller’s Heaven, the first book in my Promised Land trilogy, is available for nothing for a few days on Amazon. It’s part of a promotion for the official launch of book #2 in the series, The Storyteller’s World.

If you’d like, you could swing by and score a copy.

What’s super cool is that the amazing sci-fi author John Birmingham has posted about this event on his website, and he asked me for a short story in one of his universes. I chose the Axis of Time universe, the short is called The End of the Circle.

Click on the link above to check it out.

Busy day, so I have to get moving. More follows.

-J

Hey, everybody.

Some serious developments around here on the book front as of late.

Today I quietly launched The Storyteller’s World, the second installment of my Promised Land trilogy. To bring you up to speed, it’s an unconventional space exploration series that starts on Earth and continues in the Trappist-1 system, about forty light years from here. Good stuff happens. Bad stuff, too.

I have enjoyed writing these books; there’s a lot of speculation and thinky stuff in them.

What’s exciting to me was that Storyteller’s World was the first book I’ve ever launched in all three formats- ebook, print and audio. The print version on TSW is still in process (I’m waiting to review my proof copy), but I hope to have the paper version live by the end of next week. Ebook and audio are available right now (in the US market) for both the first book in the series, The Storyteller’s Heaven, and the second, today’s Storyteller’s World.

In the US, you can get them here.

In Australia, here.

Finally, the UK.

As you may have caught from the bit above, the audiobook versions are only available in the US for now. This is kind of a pain, because my demographic has a real international flavor. However, I’m confident that in time it’ll be available worldwide. It is what it is.

So, if you’d like to have a look, just click on the links above for the latest. As always, I’d like to hear from you all.

The actual launch will be in a few days; but I figured I’d let my peeps in on my secret.

Cheers, J

Hey guys.

I have cracked the code for producing paperbacks of my later novels, this includes the first novel in the Storyteller space-opera trilogy, and my Ohio Rifles series, an alternate World War One trilogy. Cool. Yesterday, after reviewing the proofs, I hit the big yellow publish button on Amazon four times in rapid succession. They said it would take a while for my books to churn through the review and setup process.

I was fine with that. The paperbacks have waited since 2022, when I broke my long publishing dry spell (2017-2022). I could wait another week or so. No biggie.

Well, holy crap. Amazon moved at blazing speed. This morning, less than 24 hours since I hit said buttons, I received word that my paperbacks were live on the Beast. Whoa! I checked, and the US and UK markets showed “in stock,” but Australia was not. 

OK, I waited to inform peeps about the current status of the paperbacks until Oz went live. This makes sense- one of my key demographics is Australia, in large part due to the mighty JB and his entourage. 

But now the time is here. The paperbacks are live in my three key markets, the US, AU, and the UK, and probably in others. 

If you feel like adding my scribbles to your analog collection, here are the links to make it happen.

The US.

Oz. 

The UK. 

I can’t believe the turnaround on this- I guess there’s a reason I deal with the Beast.

Nothing follows.

Jason