ARA Review by Bona10nder of Shot Down

[Bona10nder]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, Shot Down.]

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4 out of 5 stars

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"[Writing] will give me something to do while I wait—wait—wait—in hope of returning to England through the underground."

So begins Shot Down: the true story of Pilot Howard Snyder and the crew of the B-17 Susan Ruth by Steve Snyder, published by Sea Breeze Publishing and off the bat we're reminded of why we call them the greatest generation.

Howard Snyder, an average kid from somewhere, California by way of nowhere Nebraska, who answered President Roosevelt's call and went to war, like so many others across the country and the world. With all due respect, there doesn't appear to be anything overtly extraordinary about Snyder.

On being drafted, he would leave behind a pregnant wife and a small child and will pine away to her over the course of his tour of duty. During that tour, this man learned to fly big planes in the worst imaginable flying conditions, dropped lots of bombs while enduring or evading a constant barrage of flak and enemy fire, got shot down, rescued, joined the underground, helped win the war, and came home.

Of course this means he accomplished more in three years than I or many of us ever will. But that is why he is part of the greatest generation. Their bar was set at extraordinary.

This book examines Snyder's time in the US Air Force. Thanks to overly generous quotations from the diaries and letters of Snyder and others, the author paints a portrait of one young man's experience in World War II and in doing so paints the generalized portrait of that generation.

Although the book begins with Snyder's boots on the ground in Belgium, it doesn't stay there for long. In fact, in the first quarter of the book l kept asking myself when the poor kid was going to be shot down, as the title indicated. It gets so dry and factual that it at times reads a bit pedantic and like a book report about World War II and the life of the average Joe in the military.

We're given some useful information depending on your familiarity with the War, and a fair amount of information that is of no real use at all, neither educational nor enjoyable to read. Is it really necessary for the reader to know the serial number for each crew member? Or the job descriptions of the average British grounds crew?

The description of Snyder's plane, the B-17 Flying Fortress, is way overdone to anyone but hardcore connoisseurs of the B-17 and in fact entirely unnecessary for the story. The author's decision to quote too liberally from the B-17 flight manual is consistent with this habit throughout the book.

The text—the story—is salvaged in this early section by the arrival of quotes from letters written by Snyder and others to loved ones at home. Again the author went way overboard with the quotation length.

Thus was my early complaint—where's the action? I wondered if the author had any command of pace. By book's end he had changed my mind. What emerges is a book that begins like a huge marble slab. The author begins by chipping away at his story in large chunks, and the closer he gets to his story, the smaller the pieces get, until we've gone from broad generalizations regarding millions of people or extended amounts of time, down to the detail of terrified but defiant members of the Belgian resistance answering a knock on their door from the Gestapo.

Along the way, the author treats us to some interesting anecdotes. Soldiers in the infantry were always on the move, but in the Air Force fatigue could and was prevented by extending leave and passes to airmen giving them time off, even if just a day, between raids. You might wonder if that was too much time to think about the terrible things, but as the author writes,

A nineteen or twenty-year-old boy could be fighting over Germany during the day and back in London that night with the girl of his dreams.

He almost makes it sound romantic, as often happens with this subject. But death is just a moment away. To that end the author does a nice job of reminding us that in war, there are so many ways to die. Your enemy is not just those guys on the other side in the other uniforms. Sometimes vomit or spit inside oxygen lines froze within a B-17 above 10,000 feet, leading to suffocation. And of the dangers of the English countryside, he writes:

Villagers would be going about their normal daily activities when suddenly a bomber would come crashing down on top of them … civilian lives were lost when an entire aircraft or large chunks of it fell out of the sky.

Sometimes fully loaded with locally-made bombs meant for the Nazis. Regardless of how death arrived, in the military it was handled as you might expect. "Clean-out crews" would send the dead soldier's things home to his family, leaving his friends another empty bunk to ponder. With death happening so often all around you, how do you go on? The author argues that soldiers became good at denial. It helped that they were young and, in their own minds, immortal.

He touches on a number of bizarre moments, none more so than when a German fighter meets a downed Allied airman in a hospital and both apologizes and reminds his counterpart that that is how the game is played. Meanwhile his description of approaching enemy fighters is memorable:

At first they would appear as specks in the sky, each looking like an inch of silver. Quickly they would grow to two or three inches and start to give off little sparklers, indicating their guns were firing…then all hell would break loose…"

In London during the extended German blitz, Snyder notes in a letter home just how dark it is outside at night with every Londoner participating in the blackouts. Designed to make it difficult for German planes to navigate and find their targets, it was a collective effort by a huge and diverse city to protect themselves and one another against a common enemy. The analogy is thin, but it is difficult to understand why communities have been unable to replicate anything remotely resembling this during the Covid-19 pandemic. One can only imagine the fate waiting for the dissenter in London who imagined the blackout as a violation of their civil rights.

Snyder and his crew are the subjects of the book, but despite lengthy quotations one never really gets to know Snyder himself. His letters home present a man of almost uncommon fidelity and seemingly beyond temptation. At clubs and dances, while other fellas chased the gals all over the place, Snyder stands against the wall nursing a beer and missing his girl. He also seems to keep tabs on a couple of other airmen with girls back home. A good basketball player and a outstanding pilot, Snyder comes across as the older, quieter, more mature person in any group, and we rarely if ever see through that.

It is pretty exciting, not knowing what kind of country we are going to fly over next. The suspense of the unknown is exhilarating … After being a homeboy for so long and finally having something like this happen, it is like a book, only I wish it could have happened before I met you.

However, for me, nothing cemented Snyder's character in a positive manner quite like the decision he made after being rescued by Belgian farmers and sheltered by the Resistance. After spending some time going from safehouse to safehouse, Snyder decided he could no longer continue to put these good people at risk while waiting for an opening to Spain. So just over the border into France, he joined a group of underground resistance fighters and began to sabotage German war efforts leading up to and following the invasion on D-Day.

4 out of 5

Four stars for the structure of the book, for the story it tells, for the depth of research on display, and the attention to personal detail. The missing star is due to the amount of unnecessary technical information provided, and one minor other technical issue: While the book boasts a host of relevant photos, in the Kindle version there are several photo captions without their accompanying photos.

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