Stephen Ambrose, Copycat
BARNES, FRED
Stephen Ambrose, Copycat The latest work of a bestselling historian isn't all his BY FRED BARNES In 1995, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Childers, published a...
...Still, compared with Ambrose's earlier, more impressive works, the book is thinly researched...
...Asked about similarities between The Wild Blue and Wings of Morning, Simon & Schuster, Ambrose's publisher, issued this statement: "Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue is an original and important work of World War II history...
...Indeed, at one point, he appears to confuse what he read in Childers with what he heard from McGovern...
...Chil-ders's Wings of Morning tells the story of a B-24 crew that flew out of England with the Eighth Air Force toward the end of the war...
...Childers has not mounted an effort to publicize Ambrose's use of his work...
...It made me disappointed...
...Ambrose—the author of more than twenty-five books, including a dazzling trilogy on D-Day and its aftermath— quotes McGovern extensively in The Wild Blue, for the two men are longtime friends...
...Veterans love him...
...The next sentence in The Wild Blue is identical to that in Wings of Morning: "The gunner climbed into the ball, pulled the hatch closed, and was then lowered into position...
...Childers said he hasn't written Ambrose...
...His first reaction was, "this sounds awfully familiar...
...Childers said he looked up the index when he first got The Wild Blue and flipped to the parts where his work was footnoted...
...Which is perhaps why Ambrose was drawn to it...
...Changing that sentence a bit, Ambrose writes, "Although all ball turret gunners were small, few of them had enough room to wear a parachute...
...Childers says the B-24 gunner "rode suspended beneath the plane, staring down between his knees at the earth five miles below...
...He added he "doesn't want to go after Stephen Ambrose...
...Ambrose's The Wild Blue concentrates instead on McGovern, who served as a bomber pilot based in Italy with the Fifteenth Air Force...
...Childers, whose previous books have been on German history and politics, plans to make Wings of Morning the first book in a World War II trilogy...
...But it nonetheless rose quickly on the bestseller list, ranking twelfth on last week's New York Times non-fiction list...
...Ambrose is at his best" when writing about the harsh lifestyle on a B-24, Mackie commented...
...To make sure they could endure the cramped conditions, crew members were tested for claustrophobia...
...And the footnotes give no indication that an entire passage has been lifted with only a few alterations from Wings of Morning or that a Childers sentence has been copied word-for-word...
...If bailout was necessary, they relied on the waist gunner to engage the hydraulic system to raise the turret and help them out and into their parachutes...
...Well that's not true...
...The man has done an awful lot of good work...
...Ambrose has written well-regarded biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, but his fame as a historian has come from his enormously admired books on World War II...
...The first printing was half a million copies...
...Sentences in Ambrose's book are identical to sentences in Childers's...
...Ambrose says McGovern was a "good representative" of the World War II generation, "a man who had risked all not for his own benefit but to help bring about victory...
...Entitled The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany, the book got mixed reviews...
...In 2001, Stephen Ambrose, perhaps America's most popular historian and one of its most prolific, also published a book that focuses on a B-24 crew in World War II...
...This crew's pilot was George McGovern, later a senator and Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...It sold fifteen thousand copies in hardcover and remains available in paperback...
...The radio operator was Howard Goodner, a young draftee from Cleveland, Tennessee...
...Ambrose says gunners "were suspended beneath the plane, staring down between their knees at the earth...
...All this is dealt with in a single footnote that cites pages 21 to 27 in Wings of Morning with no further explanation or credit...
...Two sentences later, Childers writes, "Ball turret gunners had to be small, but even so very few could actually fit into the turret with a chute on, so they relied on the waist gunner to engage the hydraulic system to raise the turret and then get them out of the ball...
...I knew something about his career in the Army Air Forces," Ambrose writes in his author's note, "which I always felt he could have used to more effect in his 1972 presidential campaign...
...Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post called it "powerful and unselfconsciously beautiful...
...According to Childers, "The ball turret . . . was the most physically uncomfortable, isolated, and terrifying position on the ship...
...For his next book, Ambrose is researching the Pacific war, again dealing with the troops, not the brass...
...he asked...
...What has made Ambrose's book especially appealing is his focus on the soldiers and airmen, not the generals...
...Entitled Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, the book was well received by critics...
...All research garnered from previously published material is appropriately footnoted...
...He is now at work on a book about a B-17 pilot from Philadelphia who was shot down, hidden by the French, captured by the Gestapo, and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp...
...Childers interviewed the lone living surviving crew member, obtained letters from the family of another crew member, researched military records, and finished the book three years later...
...He really did a lot to shift the focus away from the high commands," Childers said...
...Stephen Ambrose, Copycat The latest work of a bestselling historian isn't all his BY FRED BARNES In 1995, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Childers, published a book about his uncle's B-24 crew in World War II...
...The publishing firm claimed the similarities involved only about ten sentences of description of technical matters and that the debt was adequately discharged in the four footnotes...
...Childers's description of all this is eye-opening and beautifully written...
...Some of the crew, notably the gunners, were faced with intense cold...
...But," he went on, "all such passages are surrounded by often banal prose...
...It didn't make me mad...
...What would I say...
...I heard about the similarities from a colleague, not from Childers, who actually assigns two of Ambrose's books, Band of Brothers and D-Day, in his classes...
...His appeal is touching...
...On his website stephen-ambrose.com, he asks any Pacific veterans to send "oral history, memoirs, diary, and/or letters home...
...None of these—the passages, sentences, phrases—is put in quotation marks and ascribed to Childers...
...The only attribution Childers gets in The Wild Blue is a mention in the bibliography and four footnotes...
...Politics aside, I had long been an admirer of what he had done in his B-24 bomber...
...Though it took a while, Childers said he was sure that "one way or another, somebody would notice" the close resemblance between his book and Ambrose's...
...The two books are similar in more than just subject...
...So, for example, one six-paragraph passage in The Wild Blue is structured like the corresponding section of Wings of Morning, with ten sentences nearly identical to sentences in Childers's book and one completely identical...
...Democratic presidential candidate...
...Ambrose leans on Childers's Wings of Morning for one important aspect of the experience of the dozen crew members aboard a B-24: the unpleasantness of life on the plane...
...The final book will take up what Childers calls "the last battle"—the return home of American servicemen after the war...
...Shame on you...
...Key phrases from Wings of Morning, such as "glittering like mica" and "up, up, up," are repeated verbatim in The Wild Blue...
...Childers, a specialist in German history who teaches popular courses at Penn on World War II and the Third Reich, was prompted to write the book after discovering in 1992 a cache of letters and photographs sent back home by Goodner from 1943 to 1945...
...In The Wild Blue, Ambrose writes, "The ball turret was, as McGovern said, the most physically uncomfortable, isolated, and terrifying position on the plane...
...Veterans often say that they don't need to do an oral history because they weren't in combat or they don't feel that what they did was all that important...
...The narrative details of the two books are obviously different...
...Whole passages in The Wild Blue are barely distinguishable from those in Wings of Morning...
...And the following sentence is remarkably similar, too...
...Regardless of what you did or where you were stationed, your history is important...
...The letters were in the house of Childers's grandmother in Tennessee...
...Band of Brothers, the story of an airborne company that jumps into France on D-Day and fights across Europe until the war ends, was turned into a ten-part television series on HBO last fall...
...One reviewer, Sam A. Mackie in the Orlando Sentinel, didn't make that link but noted the literary superiority of the part of The Wild Blue that relied on Childers to the rest of the book...
Vol. 7 • January 2002 • No. 17
