Black Sunday: Ploesti!

Black Sunday Ploesti could also have been titled “Everything You Wanted to Know about 1 August 1943 but Were Afraid to Ask.” It is an exhaustive and extremely well written account of the great air-ground battle in the skies over Ploesti on that long ago August day. The book is physically large- 9 ¼ x 12 ¼” and is 248 pages in length. In the Foreword the author notes that the initial motivation for writing this book was Dugan and Stewart’s book Ploesti which he read in his youth. That book, also extremely well written, provides an account of the battle from the command and planning level as well as from the personal level. Hill’s book, while giving an overview of the planning, focuses on the plane-by-plane and show more person-by-person experiences of the battle. To borrow a well-worn phrase it is “Up Close and Personal” and Hill does an excellent job of conveying to the reader the horror of the battle at the level of the individual participant. This focus on the individual extends to the photographic content and the appendixes include a carefully researched listing of every plane that went on the raid and, wherever possible, a picture of the aircraft in question.

I view the works of Hill and Dugan and Stewart as complimentary and, should you wish to learn more about the Ploesti battle, I would recommend reading both of them. show less