The Memphis Belle is one of the most famous B-17s in the world thanks to William Wyler’s wartime documentary The Memphis Belle.  (Later a subject of a heavily Hollywood-ized 1990 WWII flick starring Matthew Modine which can best be described as “The anti-‘Band of Brothers’ “ in my opinion it is so corny but purports to tell a "true story.")  In 2000, three years before his death, her pilot wrote his life story.

The thing that struck me when I first read this is how candid Robert K. Morgan was about his life and himself.  Without calling himself names or belittling himself, he tells us his warts as well as his strengths, his mistakes as well as his right decisions, and above all, the heart broken by the untimely death of his mother Mabel when he was a boy he later sought to fill via marriage to a woman, which led to much heartache for him.

He recalls his wartime experiences first in Europe as pilot of the famed  Belle where he flew twenty-five missions which earned him and his crew a ticket home (and a tiring War Bond tour) and then volunteered for duty with B-29’s in the Pacific theater, where he flew twenty-six as head of his own squadron of Superforts.

The text –sculpted by Ron Powers, who assisted James Bradley on his book Flags Of Our Fathers- is immaculate and typo-free.  Sentences in which Morgan’s voice comes in loud and clear.

For example, here it what he says about what it felt like at the end of his 24^th mission, one shy of the 25^th that, if the Belle made it, would earn them a ticket home:

“First thing you do is, you sit there.  You sit there.  You don’t move.  You let it wash over you for two, or three, or four, or five minutes.  You’ve come though it again.  You’ve got at least one more night of poker ahead of you.  One more morning when you won’t wake up dead.  Maybe one more red-hot date in London. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time or the twenty-fourth, which this one was.  What matters is that you’re down out of the sky.  Your wheels are on the tarmac.  You’ve brought your crew back safe.”

There is more of this.  Much, much more.

I’d recommend this book to not only WWII aficionados, but also those in search of a memoir with a very frank, human voice.