LUCK OF THE DRAW

The true World War II heroics that inspired the 1963 film The Great Escape.

After Pearl Harbor, Murphy enlisted in the Army Air Corps because “it was clear…that long-range bombing would play a major role in how the war would be fought.” Trained as a navigator, he was shipped off to an air base in England, part of a flood of young men, many still in their teens, who flew aircraft that were guinea pigs of sorts; it would be only a couple of years into the war that radar was sufficiently effective that Allied air crews could bomb on more than the rare cloudless days. As Murphy writes, crouched in a cramped B-17, he witnessed plenty of horrors as aircraft collided, were hit by anti-aircraft artillery or Luftwaffe fighters, or crashed. After parachuting into a German field, he was collected by police and sent to the infamous Stalag Luft III. Murphy’s portrait of how discipline was maintained in the camp is especially well crafted. For example, he writes about one captured general in charge who, coincidentally, had knowledge of the ULTRA code-breaking project but, despite constant interrogation by their captors, deprived them of “the biggest intelligence coup of the Second World War.” Unlike many late-in-life war memoirs, Murphy avoids most but not all clichés. He wears his flag on his sleeve, not surprisingly, and while much of his narrative concerns the horrors of combat and captivity (“Life never returned to complete normality, because ’normal’ is a relative term”), he can also wax hyperbolic: “The world will never again see a sight to equal that of the United States Eighth AF in full battle array moving majestically through the skies over Germany toward the end of the Second World War.” Frank Murphy's story in Luck of the Draw will be featured in the TV series Masters of the Air, from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.

A good choice for students of Air Force history.