Caveat Emptor: Jay A. Stout is a good friend of mine.  That said, it is very easy to recommend this book very highly, both for the quality of the information found therein, and for the quality of the story-telling and writing.

            FIGHTER GROUP is a follow-up to Stout’s well-received “The Men Who Killed The Luftwaffe,” published two years ago.  As a unit history, it differs from the run-of-the-mill work in that the author is more interested in giving the reader a sense of who the men were who served in the 352^nd - and not just the pilots but also the enlisted ground crew! - and what it was like to be in the group in terms of the life they led.  Not that there is any skimping on action, but you will come away from this book with not only knowledge of what they did and how they did it, but who they were and why they did it.

            Stout comes to the work with a background as a career Marine fighter pilot who saw combat.  Thus, he understands what was important and why, in ways the usual author who does not have that sort of background could miss.  This adds depth to the history and leads to choices in the stories to tell that others would probably fail to choose.  While the stories of George Preddy and John C. Meyer are obviously prominent, there is more to be found in the observations of a lesser-known pilot, Ted Fahrenwald, who wrote wonderful letters home.  All of the research comes from either first-person interviews with surviving members of the group (several of whom did not live to see the publication of the book), and to the collections of letters and memoirs compiled by Robert “Punchy” Powell, one of the original pilots in the group who has dedicated the past 40 years of his life to getting this material from his fellow group members while they were still alive, or getting surviving families to allow him to archive the letters and diaries of those who didn’t live to see the end of the war.  The result is a very personal take on the 352^nd Fighter Group that has been lacking in the other histories of the Blue Nosers I have read by other authors.

            Even with such well-known personalities as George Preddy and John c. Meyer, respectively the two top-ranking Mustang aces of the war, Stout manages to come up with recollections by their contemporaries and other material that provides new information to the knowledgeable reader.

            As World War II fades in memory, and as those who can tell the story first hand leave us, it is increasingly valuable to have histories like this, that don’t merely recount missions and scores, that these very interesting personalities are preserved for posterity.

            Highly recommended.

Tom Cleaver

 November 2012

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