"Bombs Away" This is the author's second book on his WW II service as a B-17 radio operator in 20 combat missions in the 490th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. The book is compiled of stories about "Hutch" and other airmen as told by the combat crew members themselves. The stories paint vivid pictures of how it was to be a part of the Eighth Air Force's bombing missions that left England to blast targets in Hitler's Third Reich. Each day the skies filled with hundreds of B-17 Flying Fortress bombers and their escorts crossing the English Channel toward enemy targets heavily protected by anti-aircraft batteries and German fighters waiting to attack the heavy bombers. Hutch writes, "The crews manned their combat positions and waited for the hell they knew was coming". Airmen of the Fifteenth Air Force blasted enemy targets in the Italian and Mediterranean theater. The author's amazing stories of survival and/or death in the deadly skies is riveting. Stories from interviews with WWII veterans and information from the 490th Historical Record provide eyewitness accounts of bombing missions, fighter attacks, mid-air collisions, and airmen shot down and imprisoned in POW camps. Final chapters tell of a childhood in the poverty and hardships of the Great Depression.The 274 page book contains 29 photos, 72 war stories and 24 tales of a Hoosier boyhood.
About the Author: James Lee Hutchinson, the author of "Bombs Away" and his first book "Through These Eyes", is now 83 years old. He was one of the 16 million young men and women called to military service in WWII more than sixty-five years ago.They left farms and loved ones behind to travel half a world away when duty called, and endured hazards and heartaches beyond their imagination. They returned home changed men and women if they came home at all. "Hutch" muses that living through a war has a way of putting everything else into perspective, and believes that the hardest of times stemming from the Great Depression prepared the youth for the hell that is war. Their attitudes and abilities earned them the moniker of the "Greatest Generation". Hutchinson grew up in the hills of southern Indiana and served 20 missions as a radio operator-gunner on a B-17 in the "Mighty Eighth", the most decorated U.S. Army Air Corps unit in World War II. He earned three air medals for his combat service. Returning home at the age of twenty he used the G.I. Bill to earn three degrees in education from Indiana University. He is retired from 37 years of service as a teacher and school administrator. February 2008, the author was honored on the floors of the Indiana General Assembly for his military service and the publication of his first book, "Through These Eyes". Hutchinson says, "I write to tell the present generation about my generation and the importance of being prepared to defend our country. I guess I'll always be an educator."