WINGS FOREVER

A biography of World War II fighter pilot Donn Deisenroth, written by his daughter.

Kay offers a nonfiction work about her father’s life before, during, and after World War II, in which he fought as a pilot in North Africa and Italy. It draws extensively from his personal “War Log,” as well as “newspaper clippings, books, flight training ‘yearbooks,’ and photographs,” which were discovered only after both of her parents were deceased. The resulting account puts readers right into the chaos of a war in which communication was relatively primitive and short bursts of aerial dogfights were followed by long stretches of restless boredom in the North African heat. There were some scary moments: “When I landed the other day my nose wheel fell off,” Deisenroth recounts in a 1943 letter; later, he wrote that he went on a “dive-bombing mission…and got jumped by eight ME109s. Have never been so scared in all my life.” While flying into Italy later that year, Deisenroth nearly died in an aerial attack: “They shot my ship to ribbons.” He was captured first by Italian soldiers, escaped, and then was captured by German soldiers. As a prisoner of war for nearly 19 months in a prison camp in Barth, Germany, he bunked in a room with up to 19 other American officers; they tried and failed to create an escape tunnel and were eventually released after the surrender of the Axis powers. Some of the book’s most engaging moments lie in Kay’s research, which contextualizes her late father’s journals and letters about his experiences with informative footnotes such as “Approximately half of all of the US military pilots who fought in WWII received their initial flight training in Stearman PT-13 Kaydet biplanes.” She also provides revealing details of social mores of early 1940s America, as when Kay’s mother, Norma, “was invited to play the violin in the Sacramento Symphony Orchestra…but she turned down that job offer so she could marry Donn.”

An educational account of an American pilot’s experiences.