Ever wonder what your father did in World War II?
How often has it been said—my father was in World War II but didn’t want to talk about it? The sounds of silence related to personal war stories reverberated in so many veterans’ households. Families were left knowing only bits and pieces of their loved one’s war narrative. Some were left with nothing at all. Finding Bomb Boogie is the story of a daughter discovering her father’s war history long after he is gone—the quiet World War II veteran and tail gunner on a B-17 named “Bomb Boogie” flying bombing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, the bomber boy of twenty-one years, scared of heights, parachuting twice out of a plane to his eventual capture by the Germans, the resilient airman held in a prisoner of war camp for twenty-two months who spent his twenty-fourth birthday on a forced march in one of the coldest winters in over fifty years, the daredevil who rolled down a hill during the march to escape detention in another prison camp, and the tired, emaciated young man who finally made it home, only to fight more battles. Finding Bomb Boogie will inspire anyone interested in breaking through their own sounds of silence to find their veteran’s stories before they quietly slip away. Lest we forget.
With much of the documentation of his wartime service and imprisonment destroyed by a fire, her hunt is at first slow and halting, until she comes across others doing similar research. Readers interested in personal stories about World War II will be fascinated by Buick's depth of research imagining what her father went through in training, in combat, as a prisoner of war, and being processed back home. Buick notes that she faced a serious generation gap with her father growing up and rarely thought of him as a veteran in the way that soldiers returning from Vietnam were. His alcoholism made him difficult to deal with, though she later came to understand this as a likely coping mechanism for PTSD.
Through her memories of her father's occasional light-hearted stories, documentation and memories from others, and actual visits to sites in Europe, Buick is able to cobble together a likely timeline for her father's experiences. While a full picture is impossible, Buick compensates by imagining likely outcomes and sharing her own feelings about her father, and how they have transformed, throughout the experience of her research and writing the book. The result is another tile in the mosaic of the personal memories and stories of those who shaped history in the war, a generation that's rapidly disappearing. Buick brings that abstract generational reality to life by documenting the mundane, the exceptional, the exciting, and the horrific alike.
Takeaway: A daughter’s probing investigation into her father’s World War II experience.
Comparable Titles: Richard Carlton Haney’s When Is Daddy Coming Home?, Jonathan Gawne’s Finding Your Father's War.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A
