EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF

Shoo Shoo Baby

A Lucky Lady of the Sky

Photographs by Dan Patterson, text by George Merva; Patterson Productions, Dayton, Ohio; 24 pages.

The B-17 Flying Fortress was introduced by Boeing in 1935. The giant, long-range bomber was a success with the Air Force, and by the end of World War Two nearly thirteen thousand had been built. Almost a third of these were lost in combat over Germany and the Pacific; today fewer than a dozen combat-veteran B-17s are known to remain.

Among them is a B-17G built in 1944. Her story is the subject of a fine small book by Dan Patterson and George Merva. The plane, Shoo Shoo Baby, named for the Andrews Sisters’ hit, flew twenty-three successful missions over Germany before she was forced down in Malmö, Sweden, after a failed run against Nazi-occupied Poznań, Poland. From there her journey became complicated, if less dangerous. Purchased by the Swedish government and later sold to Denmark, the ship was renamed and converted into a luxury airliner for a few years. Later, refitted with ice shields and cameras, she mapped Greenland’s polar ice cap, then photographed the boundaries of French colonies in Africa and South America for the French National Geographic Institute. Shoo Shoo Baby was stripped for parts in 1961 and abandoned in a field at an airport north of Paris. There her story would have ended. Fortunately, Paul McDuffee, the ship’s first pilot, was determined to recover the plane in which he had flown thirteen lucky missions over Germany.

McDuffee found the plane with the help of an Australian historian interested in B-17s, then convinced the Air Force to put in a bid for the aging hull. The French responded by selling the bomber to the United States for the symbolic price of one franc. Painstakingly rebuilt by a volunteer team of Air Force reservists led by Ray “Mac” McCloskey, Shoo Shoo Baby was back in the air in August 1988, forty-four years after her odyssey began. She is currently on exhibit at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.

This book is a testament to McCloskey’s work and a homage to the B-17 as well; the pictures are beautiful and informative; George Merva’s captions explain every detail of the plane’s operation; and the introductory text outlines the restoration process. It’s not an easy book to find, but like Shoo Shoo Baby, it’s worth the search.

The Brothers’ War

Civil War Letters to Their Loved Ones from the Blue and Gray

Edited by Annette Tapert; Times Books; 242 pages.

“All I desire,” wrote Philip Powers, an officer in the Confederate army, to his wife, “is to drive them from our soil and secure peace—I would not shed another drop. . . .” He was being magnanimous; the Union army had just been defeated at the First Battle of Bull Run, and Powers’s regiment had been credited in the Rebel newspapers with “turning the tide of victory” to the Confederacy. Later in the struggle he could not muster such liberality. “How long will a merciful God permit this war?” he asked his wife after the death of Gen. Jeb Stuart. “And will the wail of the woe that rises from bloody battlefields never cease?”

The Brothers’ War is filled with questions like these. The letters home are written by Union soldiers who find they hate the abolitionists as much as they do the Rebels and by Confederates who think every day of deserting and of a peaceful end to the conflict. The book captures the fear of the soldiers on both sides as well as the zeal of the idealists and the confusion of men fighting their brothers.

On every page there are stories of hardship and excitement, of practical jokes and inhuman horrors. A private in the Union army tells his brother how grave the tobacco shortage is and how he is forced to search for the “precious weed” in the pockets of dead Rebels. A Confederate officer tells his sister how one of his men, returning from battle wearing a salvaged Yankee overcoat, was shot through the heart by one of his fellow soldiers. After the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, a Rebel defiantly writes his wife to say, “I think the Yankees and the rest of mankind must soon come to the conclusion that the South cannot be subjugated.” And a Union son gives his mother an eloquent and moving account of his brother’s death at Gettysburg.

The letters are often ungrammatical and simple; they are also honest and straightforward. Tapert has arranged them chronologically, allowing us to see the gradual fading of excitement and high principle into the dusk of attrition and misery. In the beginning, moral certainty is the muse of many of these soldiers, both Union and Rebel; the pressing awfulness of death and battle replaces their cocksure abandon with pleas for survival. But the loss of idealism does not make for less exciting tales. We are treated to firsthand accounts of Bull Run and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. We read the testimony of Union soldiers watching Rebels rifle through the pockets of the Federal dead, taking family pictures along with money and ammunition. We are told of Confederates disguised in Union uniforms, of what it was like to be a “Fighting Quaker,” and of bitter instances of racism on both sides. One Union soldier explains that his company hates the sight of a black “worse than a snake” and tells of the men throwing rocks and branches at blacks who cross their path.

We follow the lives of captured soldiers as well. “As I went strolling by a crowd,” a Confederate captain wrote to his wife, “I found a young, fine looking [Union] officer trying to trade off a neat . . . little pocket flask, silver mounted, for a half cake of bread.” The Rebel officer extracted a promise from the prisoner that he would not attempt to escape, then took his enemy to breakfast at a nearby farm. “He said I had fulfilled the scriptures, in that when I found mine enemy a-hungered I fed him.”

On the Air

Pioneers of American Broadcasting

By Amy Henderson; Smithsonian Institution Press; 202 pages.

Broadcasting does not have a long history. The list of its pioneers and stars is etched in our national memory, and some of the early titans are still active: William S. Paley, George Burns, and Walter Cronkite chief among them. Others are gone but not forgotten: Jackie Gleason, Edward R. Murrow, Orson Welles. The Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Broadcasting’s 1988 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery placed them all together under one roof, and On the Air is the catalogue of that splendid show.

Amy Henderson’s book is more concerned with individuals than specific technological breakthroughs, and its pages are filled with succinct biographies of the creators of America’s most pervasive national media. From the story of Marconi’s first transoceanic transmission to the political result of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, On the Air is an amusing and informative look at the entertainment revolution.

The pictures, too, are wonderful. We see a whimsical Fred Allen reading into an antiquated CBS microphone, and Red Barber calling a baseball game in his wedding suit. Eddie Cantor is shown with his audience during his first live-audience radio show, and the great Lucille Ball is juxtaposed with a publicity shot of Jack Webb and Ben Alexander on the set of “Dragnet.” Al Hirschfeld’s pen-and-ink portraits of Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, and Alfred Hitchcock are here, as well as photographs of David Sarnoff reporting the loss of the Titanic and Dave Garroway during the first broadcast of the “Today” show in 1952.

The development of broadcast journalism and the rise of television are documented with equal care, and the reader is given a complete, if brief, view of the past seventy years of radio and television. America did not at first see the development of radio as a democratic tool so much as a redemptive cultural force, Henderson notes. As the Depression wore on, however, broadcasting became a popular form of cheap entertainment; comedy and variety hours ruled the airwaves.

A bit like television itself, On the Air is a quick and fulfilling distraction. For those who recall the early days of television and radio, it will serve as a scrapbook of happy memories, and for those who don’t, it will serve as a lively introduction to our nation’s broadcasting past.

The Nagle Journal

A Diary of the Life of Jacob Nagle, Sailor, from the Year 1775 to 1841

Edited by John C. Dann; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 352 pages.

In Jacob Nagle’s forty-four years as a sailor, he lived through quite a lot. Beginning in 1780, the Pennsylvania native traveled to every inhabited continent. He sailed aboard men-of-war, privateers, merchants, and passenger ships. He helped establish the first penal colony in Australia and served under Nelson in the Mediterranean. In between he caroused, brawled with fellow sailors, and dodged press gangs. Near the end of his life, he sat down to write about it all. The authentic voice of the lower gun deck is rare enough; this one came to light quite unexpectedly when John C. Dann, director of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, found an interesting-looking 161-page manuscript in a New York auction house and bought it.

Like many seventy-nine-year-olds spinning yarns, Nagle can be tedious one moment and fascinating the next. Delightful accounts of seaport life at the turn of the nineteenth century, descriptions of battles and gales at sea, and tales of exotic lands are interlarded with dense technical passages and ramblings of no apparent point.

At its best, the “journal” (“memoirs” would be a better term) gives us a firsthand glimpse at life in Nagle’s time with an immediacy that no present-day historian can match. His account of the Battle of Brandywine, which he experienced during his brief career in the army during the Revolutionary War, shows that famous engagement, known to most of us for its strategic and historic importance, through the eyes of a scared teen-ager who was not quite sure of what was going on. He describes his experiences in the early days of the Australian colony—the struggles to establish a settlement, the encounters with strange flora and fauna, and the unfamiliar habits of the natives. Perhaps most interesting are the occasional stories where he shows his personal side—in particular, one about how he and a shipmate rescued a fallen woman from her life of sin. These passages have a guileless charm.

Unfortunately, Nagle’s narrative all too often bogs down in quotidian details of what ship he joined when, and how many guns it had, and what ports it called at, and what cargo it was carrying, and so on. At one point he covers a two-year voyage in a couple of paragraphs, while elsewhere he rattles on about some minor incident. There is little detail on the day-to-day routine and duties of a sailor. The understandable lack of historical background, remedied to some extent by the editor’s notes and chapter introductions, often makes the events hard to follow for the nonspecialist. And Nagle’s Chauceresque spelling, while quaint, eventually becomes trying.

The professional historian, or the reader who has a fairly extensive knowledge of nautical matters from this era, will find something of interest on almost every page. For anyone else the best way to approach The Nagle Journal is to read it bit by bit. The book is a gold mine of interesting facts and details, but it can take some digging to get to the nuggets.