My Life in the Service: The World War II Diary of George McGovern by George S. McGovern (review)

George McGovern's exploits as a B-24 bomber pilot during World War II earned for him the most distinguished military record of any twentieth-century major-party presidential candidate not named Eisenhower. His reluctance to capitalize upon his war-time record during the 1972 campaign was a major factor in his lopsided loss that year. In 2001, Stephen Ambrose related his story in The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany. The publication of McGovern's wartime diary now adds additional detail to the narrative. Supplementing a facsimile copy in McGovern's own careful handwriting is a printed version of the diary. The calm, can-do spirit of the twenty-two-year-old pilot shines through his words, which also testify to his capacity as a pilot as well as to his unusual maturity and leadership skills.

The more than 18,000 B-24s that filled the skies over Europe and Asia were the workhorses of the Allied air forces. At 65' long and 18' high, with a wingspan of 110' (different models varied slightly in their dimensions), the storied "Liberator" plane sported a maximum speed of 300 mph and cruised at 200 mph, with a range of 2,850 miles. By November 1944 when McGovern and his ten-man crew conducted their first bombing mission, the German Wehrmacht offered scant resistance, but withering anti-aircraft barrages and bad weather downed substantial numbers of planes on every bombing run, limiting the chances that crew members would survive the required thirty-five missions to complete their tour of duty. Flying out of a base near Cerignola, Italy, McGovern, who had been shy as a kid and terrified of flying when he began, overcame the airman's natural fear of death, completing his final mission on April 25, 1945, just two weeks before Germany surrendered.

The South Dakotan's diary entries were expansive early on, describing train travel, housing facilities, fellow recruits, rifle training, bayonet practice, gas mask drills, guard duty, weather, and food. As his training continued in several different places in 1943 and 1944, the entries became shorter and less descriptive. Once in combat, McGovern recorded almost every flight in plain, straightforward language, omitting heroics and seldom referring to feelings and emotions or offering comments on the ultimate meaning of it all. Readers get a good sense of the seriousness, sense of purpose, and matter-of-fact dedication that American aviators like him brought to the task.

McGovern's crew and his fellow pilots admired and even revered his steadiness, composure, and skill as a pilot, and the responsibility he readily assumed for the safety of his men. The diary reveals that while in Italy he decided to become a college history professor. We hear about his admiration for his father when he was informed of his death, and we can picture him spending many hours in between bombing runs reading history. Other sources indicate that it was Charles and Mary Beards' 1,700-page The Rise of American Civilization that he was reading, that he had gotten married in October 1943, how he felt when during flight training he witnessed the first accident in which a pilot got killed, the impression made on him by ill-nourished kids who swarmed around him and his compatriots begging for food when their ship landed at Naples, or the devastating impact on him of seeing a bomb that had accidentally fallen out of his plane land directly on an Italian farm house at noon. McGovern feared, mistakenly, that they had just wiped out an innocent family. Read this account, supplementing it with other sources to obtain the full story of George McGovern's wartime experience, a record that won for him the Distinguished Flying Cross.