Reviews
Down in a Free State: Wartime Air Crashes and Forced Landing in Eire, 1939-1945 by John Quinn
tomunro's review
3.0
I picked this up second hand in a bookshop in Carrick Fergus. Having already heard and read much about The Donegal Spitfire, I was curious enough in a book about other wartime crashed aircraft in Ireland.
This book is based on the author's research and trips to many crash sites around what is now the Republic of Ireland, and he has some striking photos of bits of wreckage still visible, including sizeable undercarriage struts, on the various mountainsides where the aircraft crashed.
In following various different events, the book doesn't have quite the same narrative structure as the Donegal Spitfire (whose disappearance gets a reference). In places it reads more like an archive, than a historical book. At others, in the author's terse notes about events and engagement with other agencies, it veers towards memoirs.
Nonetheless there is much of interest, particularly in the accounts of survivors, either contemporaneously recorded or when interviewed fifty years later by the author.
It is in capturing that personal experience, the triumphs and the tragedies, that the book strikes most powerfully. For example the skilful rescuing of a fellow crew adrift in the Bay of Biscay, or the rescuers themselves coming to grief several flights later on a foggy Irish hillside.
Relatively few of the crashes owed anything to enemy action, partly because of the remoteness of the Island of Ireland from the air war, but instead we hear of men flying the cutting edge technology of their day, yet still operating someway beyond safe limits in terms of navigational aids and margins of error and exposure to the elements.
But the letter written by one Luftwaffe crash survivor to the author, struck a contemporary chord with me.
"After the war I made a film for Nato "Air Umbrella over Europe" and flew in supersonic jets with Luftwaffe, R.A.F. & U.S.Airforce. It was rather strange that this bloody war was fought and so many lives lost for nothing. We were all toys of politicians."
This book is based on the author's research and trips to many crash sites around what is now the Republic of Ireland, and he has some striking photos of bits of wreckage still visible, including sizeable undercarriage struts, on the various mountainsides where the aircraft crashed.
In following various different events, the book doesn't have quite the same narrative structure as the Donegal Spitfire (whose disappearance gets a reference). In places it reads more like an archive, than a historical book. At others, in the author's terse notes about events and engagement with other agencies, it veers towards memoirs.
Nonetheless there is much of interest, particularly in the accounts of survivors, either contemporaneously recorded or when interviewed fifty years later by the author.
It is in capturing that personal experience, the triumphs and the tragedies, that the book strikes most powerfully. For example the skilful rescuing of a fellow crew adrift in the Bay of Biscay, or the rescuers themselves coming to grief several flights later on a foggy Irish hillside.
Relatively few of the crashes owed anything to enemy action, partly because of the remoteness of the Island of Ireland from the air war, but instead we hear of men flying the cutting edge technology of their day, yet still operating someway beyond safe limits in terms of navigational aids and margins of error and exposure to the elements.
But the letter written by one Luftwaffe crash survivor to the author, struck a contemporary chord with me.
"After the war I made a film for Nato "Air Umbrella over Europe" and flew in supersonic jets with Luftwaffe, R.A.F. & U.S.Airforce. It was rather strange that this bloody war was fought and so many lives lost for nothing. We were all toys of politicians."
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