What You Actually Get When You Pick Up This Book
I ran into The Enemy Above A Novel Of World War Ii at a bookstore in 2019 when I was looking for something on the B-17 crews over Schweinfurt. I ended up reading it in three days because it doesn't waste time with exposition. The writing is functional, sometimes dry, but it pulls you into the cockpit of a bomber crew fast enough that you forget you're reading. The story follows an American bombardier and his crew as they fly combat missions over Nazi Germany. It's not a military strategy deep-dive. It's about the people in the plane, the noise, the fear, and the boredom that sits between the terror. That contrast is what makes it work.
The Enemy Above A Novel Of World War Ii
If you're trying to find a copy, it's available through standard channels. Amazon has both the Kindle and paperback editions, and the audio version is narrated by a couple of different voices depending on the edition. Library copies are easy to find too since the book has been in print long enough to show up on Interlibrary Loan requests without any hassle. Here's something most reviews don't mention. The combat sequences in this book are short. Not every chapter has action. Some chapters are just crew members dealing with equipment failures or arguing over strategy. For readers expecting constant dogfighting, that pacing feels slow. For anyone who's actually read primary source interviews from bomber crews, that pacing is exactly right. The downtime is what the veterans always talked about. I hit one problem when I recommended this to a friend who wanted pure historical accuracy. She got hung up on a few technical details around the B-17's navigation systems. The book takes some literary liberties with the timeline and composites certain mission details. If you're using it as a supplement to serious historical research, cross-reference the Schweinfurt raids with the official Eighth Air Force records. The book gets the big picture correct. It just compresses things for narrative flow.
The character development is where this book actually shines. The crew members aren't archetypes. They're not the brave leader, the comic relief, the rookie, the veteran. They're complicated people making bad decisions and good ones without any clear pattern. The author doesn't tell you how to feel about any of them. You figure it out yourself as the missions progress. One thing that surprised me on a second read. The secondary characters who appear briefly in early chapters come back later with more depth. The author plants these people in the background and then gives them actual weight when the story needs it. That's a technique that doesn't always work in war fiction, but here it does because the author respects the reader's attention enough to follow through. The ending is abrupt. I mean that literally. The final chapter wraps up within a few pages of the last major event. There's no extended epilogue tying everything together with neat sentiment. Some readers found that unsatisfying. I found it accurate to how those wars actually ended for the people who fought them.
Get the Full Details
If you're looking for a lighter read, this isn't it. The violence is clinical rather than graphic, which means it hits harder in some ways because the author treats death as a matter-of-fact part of the job. The emotional weight comes from the implications, not from descriptive gore. The book runs about 400 pages in most editions. That's a reasonable length for the scope it covers. The author could have padded it with filler dialogue or unnecessary subplots. He didn't. The decisions about what to leave out are as important as the decisions about what to include. For anyone interested in this period of history, it works well as a narrative introduction before diving into the heavier technical histories. It gives you the human perspective that dry operational accounts often skip over entirely. Then you layer the detailed research on top of that foundation and you get a much clearer picture of what actually happened.
I keep coming back to the same observation. The best war novels aren't about war. They're about people who find themselves in war and have to decide who they want to be while they're in it. This book knows that distinction and writes accordingly.
