A Fallen Eagle: A WWII B-24 Pilot in the 15th Air Force with the 450th BG "Cottontails"

This is a touching true story of love, family, honor, and duty. This book appeals to WWII buffs, but also to anyone who cherishes family and country. One can read the letters of Clyde Odis Primrose, Jr. and watch as a simple, country lad from East Texas, within two short years, grows into a man willing to give his all for his country. Lt. Col. Cowart has done a masterful job of research and has added invaluable technical information and insight to the story of Lt. Primrose. From the first page, one will be captivated by the actual letters written by Primrose to his family. The reader will be reminded that, like Lt. Primrose, most all of our heroes have been ordinary people doing more than was expected of them. A Fallen Eagle: WWII B-24 Pilot in the 15th Air Force with the 450th BG "Cottontails"

Historians of the World War II air war don’t even attempt efforts to gloss over the loss of airplanes and air crews to training accidents. They don’t bother to mention them at all, whether the accidents occurred within the United States or overseas.The burden of documenting these accidents - the airplane crashes and, usually, the deaths of pilots and crew - have fallen to a dedicated group of amateur historians who call themselves “wreck chasers” or aviation archeologists. The first term makes these dedicated researchers sound like they belong in a reality television show, which they certainly do not. The latter term strikes me as being more accurate and true to form.Even those books written by the participants themselves rarely mention the loss of crews due to training accidents. Autobiographies and memoirs of the war start with brief descriptions of where the writer was born, give short descriptions of life before enlistment - or being drafted - and then off to training for a page or so. The bulk of memoirs focus on where the boys served.We have excellent stories of the horrors of flying missions, of seeing best buddies shot down in flames, etc. But precious little about what really happened during training. This is understandable since, unless the boys were taking notes, it is easy to see how events subsequent to arriving overseas could have overshadowed everything that came before.This is what makes Clarence P. Coward’s book, A Fallen Eagle, such a fine contribution to the story of what happened to pilots before combat. Coward reconstructs the brief life of 2nd Lt. Clyde Odis Primrose from letters written home to Primrose’s parents and family. Co-pilot Primrose was shot down over Ploesti and killed in action on July 15, 1944. He had just celebrated his 21st birthday. Of the eleven men aboard Primrose’s B-14, only the pilot survived.Though his letters are not deeply factual (after all, they were meant to tell his family what he was up to, not as historical documents) Primrose does mention some of the grittier stories of training as well as his opinion on the B-24 he was trained to fly. This makes A Fallen Eagle an important primary source about training accidents and their impact on air crews.Reviewed by Peter Stekel, author of, Final Flight: The Mystery of a WWII Plane Crash and the Frozen Airmen in the High Sierra.

My Dad flew with the CottontailsThis is awesome

A nice read.

This is a very good and concise story of gallantry of the B-24 pilot. He was one of the heroes of the war. It was a very interesting read. Well written and enlightening. If you want to know about the era and the B-24 this is a book for you.

great book my wifes great uncle unit, love it

great book

Over two million Americans served in the Army Air Force during World War II. Some 90,000 didn't return home, having died in the service of their country. Included in that number was Clyde Odis Primrose, Jr., killed at the controls of a 15th Air Force B-24 on 15 July 1944. A FALLEN EAGLE, published in 2009, is the record of the short life and military career of that young flier.Born into a hardscrabble East Texas life in 1923, Odis Primrose was the handsome, lanky eldest son in a family of eleven. Bitten by the flying bug in high school after taking a plane ride, he was determined to be an Air Force pilot. Enlisting in June 1942, he succeeded in his dream despite possessing only a high school education. Assigned to the 450th BG in August 1943, he had flown 38 missions when his B-24 was destroyed over Ploesti. Primrose's remains were returned to the States in 1951.A FALLEN EAGLE consists of the letters Primrose wrote to his family. Author/editor Clarence Cowart divided those letters into chapters covering Primrose's early service career, Basic Training experience, Preflight experience and so on. Cowart prefaced each selection of letters with background information as well as concluding chapters covering the immediate period after Primrose's death, attempts to ascertain his status, the family's efforts to have his remains returned, etc. The book also features dozens of photos of Primrose, his family, crew, B-24s, camp life and so on.The letters found in A FALLEN EAGLE are so representative of the thoughts and sensibilities of the young kids of the Greatest Generation who went to war. They tell of the varied experiences of service life and then life in a combat unit, often minimizing the danger for the sake of the family, while, at the same time, maintaining the ties to home and hearth by asking a hundred-and-one questions of family doings in Texas.A FALLEN EAGLE puts a face to the 'Killed in Action' statistics. Paging through Primrose's letters, the reader gets to know and like that young Texan...and grieves when his life, so full of promise, is snuffed out in an instant. In the end, A FALLEN EAGLE is an affecting tribute to Odis Primrose and all those other young Americans who died in World War II for our freedom. Recommended.