The Hostile Sky

In the summer of 1942 Jim Vernon, a nineteen-year-old student in Butte, Montana, joined the U.S. Navy’s aviation cadet training program. By the end of the war he was flying F6F Hellcats from the USS Ticonderoga against the Japanese mainland. This memoir provides a carrier pilot’s view of the conflict in the Pacific during the final months of the war when the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan capitulated. A member of VBF-87, Vernon gives a highly personal eyewitness account of life in a bomber-