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Informationen zum Autor Harry Mazer's The Last Mission is drawn closely from his experiences as a seventeen-year-old in the Army Air Corps. Like Jack, he was a Jewish boy from the Bronx full of fantasies about heroism, and like Jack, he became a waist gunner and never fired his guns. He remembers, "I was scared every time we flew....On our 26th mission we flew over Pilzen, Czechoslovakia, to bomb the Skoda Munitions Works. We missed our target, turned over the target again, and were hit. I saw Mike, who was our radio operator, frozen in the door of the radio room. He never made it out of the plane. Only three of us parachuted....No one in the plane lived." ( ALAN Review, Fall 1980) Harry Mazer is the editor of Twelve Shots: Outstanding Short Stories About Guns, where twelve authors explore the extreme emotions that guns provoke in all of us. Walter Dean Myers, Rita Williams-Garcia, Richard Peck and other well-known authors create a riveting collection of short fiction that explores the emotion-driven world of guns. Klappentext In 1944, as World War II is raging across Europe, fifteen-year-old Jack Raab dreams of being a hero. Leaving New York City, his family, and his boyhood behind, Jack uses a false I.D. and lies his way into the U.S. Air Force. From their base in England, he and his crew fly twenty-four treacherous bombing missions over occupied Europe. The war is almost over and Hitler near defeat when they fly their last mission -- a mission destined for disaster. Shot down far behind enemy lines, Jack is taken prisoner and sent to a German POW camp, where his experiences are more terrifying than anything he'd ever imagined.(October 1944. Alexandria Army Air Field, Louisiana.) Jack Raab knelt in the shadow of the big bomber. It was early, but hot, and there was no shade anywhere on the airfield except under the wings of the plane. The six crewmen sprawled out under the B-17 were waiting for their officers. They were here for the last phase of training before going into combat. To Jack, the other enlisted men were everything he wasn't—older, tougher, self-confident. None of them seemed nervous. Jack rapped his feet together, pleased with his boots’ soft dark shine. You're in the Army now , the boots said to him, and it came over him like a shock, the way it did each time. Fifteen years old, and in the United States Air Corps. Jack pulled his coveralls away from his sweaty back. They'd been waiting for nearly an hour. He blinked against the gritty Louisiana wind and wiped the dust from his boots. Ankle-high, brown, laced-up, round-tipped GI boots. A solid size 12, double K. He moved his feet so the ox-blood polished surface caught the light. The night before he'd broken them in, GI’d them. Scrubbed them with a brush and a strong yellow soap, then let them dry to the shape of his feet, and finally polished them with ox-blood polish. He had never really believed he would fool the Air Corps this long. The only reason he had was his size. He had always been big for his age. At fourteen he'd been taller than his older brother and nearly as tall as his father, who was just a hair under six feet. Jack had never been sick a day in his life, but his brother, Irv, had been sick a lot. Irv had been bora with a rheumatic heart. Their mother was always after Irv to be careful. Not that she had anything to worry about: The only things Irv liked to do were read and argue. Jack liked action. He was on the street all the time, playing games—stickball, handball, touch football, and war games. Ever since the war started Jack and his friends had been playing commando, dividing into two teams, the Nazis and the commandos. Jack was always a commando, and when he got one of the "Nazis" he really knocked him around. Jack had been ten in 1939 when the Germans occupied Poland. His parents and their friends had cried. Hitler's name was a curse. For year...
