AN INNOCENT AT POLEBROOK
A MEMOIR OF AN 8TH AIR FORCE BOMBARDIER
by
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About the Book
This is a true story about an innocent 18-year old plucked from his small hometown in California who found himself at 19 riding in the nose of a heavy bomber under conditions he could not possibly have imagined. The book explores the excruciating tension between his innocence and the raw reality of war. As a bombardier riding in a Plexiglas compartment, the author had a unique vantage point from which he could behold grand vistas. He witnessed the beauty of clouds and the high altitude sky, the ever-changing scene below of sea, mountains, rivers and towns. But he also observed armadas of bombers stretching out ahead like flocks of geese, the horrifying barrages of black antiaircraft fire, the menace of enemy interceptors and the heartbreaking spectacle of wounded bombers. This book follows the everyday activities of a bombardier in the Air Force during World War II. There are no heroics in this account other than the courage of men who performed their jobs despite withering enemy opposition and the ever-present specter of sudden death. It is a collage of agonizing apprehensions, numbing fright, occasional pride, bitter disappointments, abject loneliness, fits of anger and even good times. The author wrote the book in 1st person, present tense so that, in a sense, the reader could ride with him in the glassed-in nose of a B-17. He bolstered his recollections of each mission with raw facts gleaned from tattered and yellowing mission reports that are filed in neat folders in the National Archives in D.C. and from numerous letters sent to and kept by his parents.
About the Author
Charles N. Stevens, or Norm as
his friends call him, grew up in
After returning from overseas he
trained as a radar bombardier at Langley Field, Virginia and Williams Field,
Arizona. He was to be assigned to a B-29 crew for duty in the Pacific when the
war ended.
Following the war he enrolled at
U.C.L.A., graduating with a BA in psychology. After a series of graduate courses,
he earned his teaching credential. Over a span of 32 years he taught general
science and mathematics in junior high school and English and literature in
high school. While teaching he earned a master’s degree in English at
California State College at
He has two sons by a previous
marriage, Jeffry L. Stevens and Greg E. Stevens and five
grandchildren---Brenda, Sharon, Eric, Michael and Beth.
He retired in 1984 and has lived
a life of reading, writing, traveling and being a grandfather. He lives with
his wife, Dolores Seidman, in