Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Finding a Fallen Hero
Subtitle: The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner
Author: Bob Korkuc
Narrator: Richard Travis
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-27-16
Publisher: University Press Audiobooks
Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs
Publisher's Summary:
To all appearances, Anthony "Tony" Korkuc was just another casualty of World War II. A gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress, Korkuc was lost on a bombing mission over Germany, and his family believed that his body had never been recovered. But when they learned in 1995 that Tony was actually buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his nephew Bob Korkuc set out on a seven-year quest to learn the true fate of an uncle he never knew.
Finding a Fallen Hero is a compelling story that blends a wartime drama with a primer on specialized research. Author Bob Korkuc initially set out to learn how his Uncle Tony came to rest at Arlington. In the process, he also unraveled the mystery of what occurred over the skies of Germany half a century ago.
Korkuc dug up military documents and private letters and interviewed people in both the United States and Germany. He tracked down surviving crewmembers and even found the brother of the Luftwaffe pilot who downed the B-17.
A gripping chronicle of exhaustive research, Finding a Fallen Hero will strike a chord with any listener who has lost a family member to war. And it will inspire others to satisfy their own unanswered questions.
Members Reviews:
The perfect tribute to a fallen warrior
Few books are done this well.
This is an example of superb reporting, the painstaking attention to meticulous detail to create a great story that soars above any slips in writing or inattention in editing.
I've flown in a B-17, roaming from the nose to the waist gun positions. I didn't have the nerve to get into the ball turret or the tail gun position. On the ground, a B-17 looks huge; inside, it's as cramped as a coffin. Unlike a coffin, a B-17 has no smooth edges or soft surfaces; it's as raw an airplane as was ever made.
Crew members must have felt they were on a ducking chair at a county fair, being blasted by unseen shotgunners. There's nowhere to duck, nowhere to hide, nowhere to run for shelter or safety. Korkuc does a great job explaining the nature and nerve of those who did mission after mission.
Thus he describes the raw guts of war. But the gem of his book is his seven-year search through official records and sometimes still shaken memories of airmen and civilians in Germany and the U.S. about the fate of the specific B-17 on which his uncle served and died. This is Ken Burns style of reporting at its very best.
It's a superb story, something almost never seen in today's news reports. It's great history; we already know who won the war, this explains what it took to win. It provides a very human touch to otherwise often impersonal records.
If I were teaching journalism (or history), this book would be mandatory reading. Students would need an "A" to graduate as a reporter or history major. This is as good as it gets, for history or news reporting.
One minor point: If I were editing, I'd want to know how anyone would know a person's final thoughts just moments before death. It's a minor glitch, one I've seen even seasoned journalists make.