Tailspin, by John Armbruster, is more than a memoir of war—it is a painstaking excavation of memory and mortality, told through the dual lenses of witness and chronicler. At its center is Gene Moran, a boy of eighteen from Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, flung without ceremony into the great conflagration of the Second World War. As a tail gunner aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress, he occupied the most vulnerable position in one of the most imperiled machines in the Allied arsenal.

By Skeeter Wesinger
May 3, 2025
On a bombing run over Bremen in 1943, his aircraft was torn apart by German flak. The tail section—Moran’s solitary outpost—sheared off from the fuselage and plummeted to earth. That he survived the four-mile descent without a parachute is not merely improbable; it borders on the metaphysical. His body shattered, his skull fractured, Moran was nonetheless taken alive by German forces and would spend the next seventeen months in the tightening vise of captivity. Hunger, isolation, and a brutal 600-mile forced march across the collapsing Reich marked the twilight of his war. He emerged at last in 1945, not unbroken, but unbowed.

For nearly seventy years, Moran spoke little of these events. His nine children knew only fragments, the silence around them more eloquent than words. It was not until a high school history teacher—Armbruster himself—encountered the tale that the long-withheld narrative was drawn out, session by painstaking session, in what the author came to call “Thursdays with Gene.”
And yet, Tailspin is no simple war chronicle. As Armbruster peeled back the layers of Moran’s trauma, he found himself walking a parallel path of anguish: his wife’s harrowing decline from brain cancer. In this dual descent—one into memory, the other into grief—the author traces a shared terrain of endurance. The result is a book as much about what men endure as what they remember. It is a study in quiet heroism, and in the haunting persistence of the past.

That Tailspin is John Armbruster’s first book is, frankly, difficult to believe. The prose bears none of the hesitancy of a debut work. Rather, it reads with the confidence of a seasoned chronicler—one who knows not only how to follow the thread of a remarkable life but how to weave it into the larger fabric of human endurance and moral complexity. It is, in every sense, a great read—for veterans and civilians alike, for students of history and those merely seeking to understand the cost of silence. In a literary landscape crowded with noise, Tailspin speaks quietly—and all the more powerfully for it.

 

https://substack.com/profile/108665302-skeeter-wesinger/note/c-114148360?utm_source=substack&utm_content=first-note-modal

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