Air War Complete. Four Volumes in One

by Edward Jablonski

Illustrated with some eight hundred photographs, four highly acclaimed works by a noted aviation historian are brought together to provide a detailed chronicle of aerial warfare during the Second World War

259 pages, Hardcover

First published January 2, 1979

About the author

Edward Jablonski was the author of several biographies on American cultural personalities, such as George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Alan Jay Lerner and Irving Berlin, as well as books on aviation history.

Jablonski was born in Bay City, Michigan to a family of Polish-American journalists and writers. His father had been a writer for Sztandar Polski and another relative, Paul F. Jablonski, wrote for the Bay City Times. Early on he fell in love with the music of George and Ira Gershwin. A fan letter he wrote to Ira while in school quickly turned into regular correspondence and eventually a lasting friendship with the lyricist.

While Jablonski was interested in music, his true fascination was with aviation. Supposedly, he spent much of his time watching the planes at the James Clements Airport near the South End of Bay City. He had grown up, he said later, listening to the music of the day as he ''hung around the airport watching the planes.'' As a schoolboy he also started a correspondence with Gershwin. Later on in his life, he became interested in aerial warfare. Telling an interviewer in 1986, "Aviation makes possible the most deadly form of warfare ever -- the perversion of one of man's greatest inventions."

He served in the United States Army Field Artillery in New Guinea during World War II. For his actions in New Guinea, he was awarded the Silver Star.

After leaving the army, he attended junior college in Bay City as a pre-journalism major. He continued his studies at the New School for Social Research, receiving his bachelor's in 1950. He also completed postgraduate work in anthropology at Columbia.

While working for the March of Dimes charity in New York, Jablonski wrote articles and music reviews for a number of small magazines as well as liner notes for albums; this was the beginning of a fifty-year freelance career.

At the time of his death, he was working on "Masters of American Song", which would have been a comprehensive history of American pop music.

Reviews

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I sat down to read the 755 page, 4-in-1 volume edition of Edward Jablonski’s Airwar, I was expecting something along the lines of Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War, but chronicling the history of air warfare during World War II instead of naval warfare. Mr. Jablonski does indeed do a good job of covering almost all aspects of the air war, from the early clashes between Japanese and Chinese air forces and the initial blitzkrieg in Poland and France, all the way to the final desperate kamikaze attacks and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what I didn’t expect—and what pleasantly surprised me and made me give Airwar a 5-star rating—was the focusing within the Big Picture on individual stories of the specific men (and women too, but due to the nature of how wars are fought, the focus is mostly on men) who fought and lived and died and lost and won the countless battles in the air. I had expected a story told on a panoramic canvas, but I didn’t expect the story to have such a human face. Bravo!