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Flying from the Black Hole: The B-52 Navigator-bombardiers of Vietnam
Flying from the Black Hole The B52 Navigatorbombardiers of Vietnam Author:Robert O. Harder U.S. Air Force navigators and bombardiers have long labored under the shadow of pilots, their contributions misunderstood or simply unknown to the public. This was especially the case with the B-52 non-pilot aircrews in the Vietnam War. Yet, without them, it would have been impossible to execute nuclear war strike plans or fly conventional bombi... more »ng sorties. With this book, one of their own reveals who these men were and what they did down in the Black Hole of the B-52 bomber. It is the only work to detail the B-52 air war in Vietnam from the perspective of a navigator-bombardier. The book's opening thrusts the reader into the thick of the war's climactic 1972 Hanoi Christmas bombing, an operation so poorly planned that it nearly became a disaster of epic proportions. The author then offers a history of the development of bombing techniques and the evolution of bomber aircraft, focusing on the Vietnam-era B-52. Final chapters return readers to the eleven-day Christmas War over Hanoi and Haiphong for an insider's view of that defining battle, described by the author as the last massed, heavy bomber raid the world will ever see. The author brings the book to a close with a discussion of the B-52 and its capabilities in the twenty-first century.« less