The Last Liberator

by Jerry Yulsman

As a team of B-24 Liberator bombers undertakes an almost suicidal mission against the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti, flight engineer Abe Cohen, a petty thief who adopted a Jewish alias to hide from mob vengeance, fights his own private battle within himself

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published December 13, 1991

About the author

Jerry Yulsman (born February 8, 1924 - August 6, 1999) was an American novelist and a photographer best known for his photographs of Jack Kerouac, notably the cover illustration on Joyce Johnson's memoir Minor Characters.

Reviews

[Ralph Echtinaw]

I haven't read a book this good in a long time. Author Jerry Yulsman himself flew on the Ploesti mission and evidently remembers all the sights, smells and feelings clearly. What's more, he has the skill as a writer to communicate these sensations well. I've read a lot of World War II aviation stuff, and this book comes closer than anything else I've seen to showing what the total experience was like. Yulsman's attention to detail in describing the bomb loading, aerial gunnery, moving around inside the Liberator, etc. is as welcome as it is rare in my experience. Yet the scene-setting description and attention to detail never overwhelms the plot of the story. Yulsman sets us up to believe that the protagonist's pilot is a jerk, and he is, but he turns out to be a stand-up guy in battle, which wasn't uncommon in reality. The protagonist, an Italian-American from "Hell's Kitchen" in New York, comes to embrace the Jewish faith in the end, but Yulsman handles this without getting heavy-handed. To sum up, anyone with an interest in World War II aviation will probably love this book. However, you probably won't like it as much if you don't have an interest in World War II aviation.

[James]

Purchased at a Cobb Library book sale in March, 2010. During the pandemic, I once again perused my bookshelves

[Steve]

"As a team of B-24 Liberator bombers undertakes an almost suicidal mission against the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti, flight engineer Abe Cohen, a petty thief who adopted a Jewish alias to hide from mob vengeance, fights his own private battle within himself." An entertaining read, with an appearance by Jack Benny!