Author: James Lowell Armstrong

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780806137643

As a young naval aviator, Dusty Rhodes was shot down by the Japanese on his first combat mission in World War II. Toughing out the rest of the war in POW camps, he wondered if he would ever fly again. But Rhodes was destined to take flying to new heights. As only the third fighter pilot to become leader of the Blue Angels, Raleigh E. "Dusty" Rhodes participated in developing the most famous aerobatics team ever formed. From POW to Blue Angel tells his story - a fast-paced drama teeming with action and human interest and capturing the initiative and tenacity of a true American hero. Jim Armstrong has drawn on extensive interviews with Dusty and his closest colleagues, as well as Dusty's scrapbooks, flight logs, and prison journal, to produce a rare account of the Blue Angels in the late 1940s. Readers will experience the stress of practice and the exhilaration of air shows as Armstrong takes them inside Dusty's cockpit during the team's early years. This was the era when the Blues first found fame, perfecting their trademark diamond formation and barrel roll, as well as transitioning from prop planes to jet aircraft. This book is also a moving account of the brutality Rhodes suffered for three years as a prisoner of war - the beatings, the interrogations, the forced labor - and includes his rare, ground observer's view of the firebombings of Tokyo and Yokohama. Armstrong captures Dusty's exhilaration and uncertainty in returning to a changed postwar America, and also recounts how Rhodes followed his Blue Angels command with a tour as a fighter pilot in Korea.