THE LAST TIME I SAW THEM,

by CoreyFord '-, and Alastair MacBaine, CharlesScribner's Sons, 1946, 244 pages; $2.75.

The authors, both attached to the United States Army Air Forces, herein tell stories of American flyers in Alaska (the toughest flying in the world), England, Greenland (from a previous book War Below Zero), India, Burma, China, the United States, the Philippines, and the Marianas.

I know Corey Ford to be a man who gets along well with men, who understood well the businesslike methods of the Army Air Corps, and who admired the personnel for the superb job they did. The same is true, I'm sure, of Major MacBain.

This attitude is reflected in the book. "We Had a Tree," published before in Short Cutto Tokyo, is a simple account of a Christmas spent (1942) "at our most advanced base in the Adreanofs" in the Aleutians. Then there is the report of the comradeship of the Russian flyers (in Fairbanks), who soon learned "Okey dokey Coca Cola ...." and the American airmen who were "doing more for international understanding than a million written words." Here, too, you will find the gallant story of Tail End Charlie, only nineteen, who fired at the enemy to the bitter end after a flight to Hamburg; of "ten men and a vest"; of a scarecrow in Assam, and other strange stories of our flying men.

This book, slightly sentimentalized in parts, will be of interest to parents whose sons have been in the USAAC, and will recall to the airmen themselves the "good old days" when American air power was something really to marvel at.