Ron Miner

A very nicely done biography of a "PBY Catalina" pilot in the Pacific in WW2 was assembled from his letters, logbooks, drawings, and photos. The Cat was obsolete when the war started but was still in service at the end. Doing reconnaissance, delivering freight, or rescuing downed pilots and crew, it was slow, sturdy, and very reliable. A pilot's son found his dad's papers and other memorabilia. He fleshed it out nicely with interviews, recorded memories, and some quite good museum-level research to produce this very memorable and readable memoir about his dad and the Cat.… (mehr)

With his SKETCHES OF A BLACK CAT: STORY OF A NIGHT FLYING WWII PILOT AND ARTIST, Ron Miner has done his daddy proud. Working with a treasure trove of letters, stories, drawings, newspaper clippings and other papers his father, Howard Miner, left behind, Ron blended these artifacts with careful research and personal interviews with other Black Cat alumni, to craft a beautifully rendered first-person "memoir" of a PBY 'Catalina' pilot's service in the Pacific theater of the Second World War.

Howard Miner came from a sheltered, conservative background, an Indianapolis boy who never even owned a bicycle, and attended small conservative Wabash College. He describes his initial flight training at Glenview's Naval Air Base in "the dead of winter on the edge of Lake Michigan" as a "combination of terror and incredible excitement." As part of his ground school training, he learned Morse code, which he found "kind of appealing." (I had to smile at this, because twenty years later I trained as a Morse code intercept operator with the U.S. Army.) After months of training in Illinois, Texas and California, Howard was fully certified to pilot those 'flying boats,' the PBY Catalinas. Given duty station choices of Alaska (the Aleutian Islands) or the Pacific, he chose the latter, figuring it would be much warmer there. (Again, I could relate, having been part of a group of ten Morse ops who underwent special training before assignments to either Shemya [in the Aleutians] or Sinop [in northern Turkey]. Fortunately, I got Sinop.)

And, as another very relevant aside, because Howard Miner was an artist (and a very talented one), his story immediately reminded me of another WWII memoir which was set in the Aleutians, penned by another artist and amateur naturalist, Charles Bradley, whose beautifully illustrated ALEUTIAN ECHOES, is a particular, if obscure, favorite of mine.

Howard Miner did two tours of duty in the Pacific Theater. The Catalinas of his unit were painted a flat black to make them less visible for their night flights, hence the "Black Cat" nickname, and the painted logo he designed. He flew from New Guinea to the Philippines and many of the island chains in between, including the famous names of Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Corregidor, and more. There were, of course intervals of quiet and boredom, interspersed with periods of extreme danger and high excitement. I found the search and rescue missions for downed pilots and crews of his second tour the most interesting. And there are some stunningly beautiful descriptions of the island terrain and scenery here too, for example, flying over Panay island of the Philippines -

"... the scenery seemed particularly stunning in the dwindling light, the leafy deep ridges of the mountains with rivers forming intricate networks and patterns as they emptied into the viridescent shallows of the small bays. A rich wide rainbow showed itself, gracing us with a complete circle instead of the familiar arch that is usually interrupted by land or clouds."

Howard's younger brother, Mac, was an Army medic on Leyte, and they managed to hook up briefly and Mac regaled Howard with a very graphic account of routine life on a troop ship which he'd endured getting to the Philippines.

There is much here too about first experiences - drinking, women and the various stupid stuff that young men do the first time they find themselves far from home and parental supervision, because this is also a coming-of-age story. But mostly it is about the war itself, rich in stories and anecdotes, and I could say more, but I will instead recommend a couple other such books I enjoyed just as much. The first is Samuel Hynes' beautifully written account of his time as a very young Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific, FLIGHTS OF PASSAGE, a classic of war memoirs. And there is also E.B. Sledge's WITH THE OLD BREED, about his Marine Corps tours on Okinawa and Peleliu (an island Howard Minor also knew).

True to its title, SKETCHES OF A BLACK CAT is enhanced throughout with Howard's drawings, paintings, letters and photos. This is a fine book, eminently readable and written with love. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and will recommend it very highly. Bravo, Ron Miner. Your father would be so pleased and proud. Bravo!

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (mehr)

Ron Minor's THE LAST WORD is not really a novel about the "war in the Pacific." Instead it's an awkward hybrid of a fictional look into the future (2038) and a look back into the WWII past of the 1940s (and times in between too), and, to my mind, the two elements just don't hang together very well. I couldn't quite decide if it was about Dan, the small town newspaperman, or 112 yr-old Owen, the WWII Navy crew chief - who, to be fair, did fly many night missions in the South Pacific. And because of this lack of a single, well-defined protagonist, I had a hard time staying interested. Neither character had much depth - and I do love a character-driven novel. And the plot(s) just weren't all that riveting either. There was the 2038 newsman, aided by a self-driving, talking car that also served as a sassy, executive secretary and traffic controller, trying to get down the story of of this very old man, who may be the last living veteran of the war. And there's the old man himself, with his many fragmented anecdotes and stories from eighty-plus years ago - some of which were mildly interesting, but didn't seem terribly remarkable.

I know that the old man's stories are based on materials the author saved from his late father's letters, drawings and scrapbooks, as well as interviews that Minor did with other aged veterans. It appears he tried to use as much of both sources as he could, but, as I said, the resulting narrative seems rather haphazardly stitched together and is not particularly compelling. That said, I would not hesitate to recommend it to history buffs or early aviation aficionados. (Those PBY 'flying boats' are an interesting footnote of the early aviators of the U.S. military.)

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (mehr)