My True Course

I'd known Paul W. Tibbets (pilot of the ENOLA GAY, and commander of the 509th Composite Bomb Group) personally for many years until he passed, and Ted "Dutch" Van Kirk as well. Four books recommended to me by Ted "Dutch" Van Kirk and Paul Tibbets, are THE 509th REMEMBERED (many never before seen pictures from the author's personal connection with 509th veterans), and THE SILVERPLATE BOMBERS, with an excellent forward by Paul W. Tibbets. In it's several excellent, updated reprints until he passed, were Paul W. Tibbets books ENOLA GAY, and RETURN OF THE ENOLA GAY. These four books will give you an extremely accurate, well researched and truthful knowledge of what Dutch was involved in, who with, as well as the equipment and weapons used for the atomic bomb drops on Japan in August, 1945. Since these books were recommended to me by both Paul and Dutch, we can all be sure that they're not tainted by any "revisionary" overtones. These four books were written by aviation enthusiasts (and the commander of the 509th, Paul W. Tibbets) FOR aviation and military history enthusiasts. When you compare My True Course against any of these four books (books that were recommended to me by the men who were there), there's absolutely NO comparison. Dietz shows much more concern with her footnotes and Dutch's family history, than with Dutch's relationship to WW2 aviation and the August 6th, 1945 Hiroshima, Japan atomic bomb drop. Dietz's overpowering need to researching Dutch's family (the uncle of the aunt of the brother's wife's half-sister's nephew's son, etc.), became such an overpowering obsession with her, that the book took a year longer to complete. A point of fact is that Dietz had to be pushed in 2011 by Dutch to stop pursuing that tact, so that the book could finally get done. Dietz knew nothing about any of what she's written relating to aviation history and aviators, other than what she's pulled out of archives and other books. Nothing unique or "new" is written in "My True Course", other than Dutch's (although 'edited' by the author) letters, woven through her interviews with Dutch. Dietz's 'edited' interviews with Dutch, exclude what Dutch experienced within the realities and horrors of aerial warfare/combat, or what he saw happening his friends and other crew members. What Dutch (and many other US Army Air Corp's veterans) went through in aerial warfare/combat in WW2, seems to have been "cleansed" from the interviews, in a way that absolutely reeks of revisionism. Many of us have a true knowledge of the different aspects of aviation history, especially those of us who've spoken with a great number of the veterans who've experienced it. Dietz's heavily footnoted failure gives you the sense that you're missing something, since what you're experiencing when you read My True Course is Dietz's "new found" understanding of aviation history. If you've read My True Course, your seeing first hand that this book wasn't written by an author who has the experience and knowledge of being from within (or having had any interest in) the field of aviation, or aviation history in general. Her association with or knowledge of how any well known aviators related to Dutch is non-existent. For example, even Richard "Dick" Cole, Jimmy Doolittle's co-pilot on the April 18, 1942 Tokyo raid (in retaliation for the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor), was unceremoniously dropped from doing the main forward. This had been set up and agreed to with the Doolittle Raiders organization in June of 2010. However, Dick Cole was relegated to only being "A Voice From the Doolittle Raid" in the book, as Dietz felt so strongly about the person she ended up using instead. This isn't the place to go though how many agreements with how many people this author broke from to do her version of Dutch's biography, but suffice it to say that the only reason Dick Cole was in the book at all, was because of the insistence with Dutch that Cole not be dropped altogether. Dietz's knowledge and understanding of any type of aviation information, no matter how it would relate to what or to whom (war, aviators, aircraft, etc.), comes only from what she'd found in other books, or in archives, which anyone could read and copy. Unlike other well known and respected aviation authors, Dietz doesn't come from a background of having any interest in aviation in any way, shape or form, which is why an aviation "flavor" (for lack of a better term) is missing from this book. Those four books I mentioned at the beginning are what I'd hoped My True Course was going to have been able to stand along side of. Instead, MY True Course falls far short of anything ever written concerning the European and Pacific air wars of WW2.