LUCKY 666: My (former) Amazon review

Preface

For those wondering if I’ve reviewed Lucky 666 on Amazon, yes I have. But you can’t read it anymore.

My first Amazon review of Bob Drury and Tom Clavin’s Lucky 666: The Impossible Mission was approved and posted the same month the book was published, October 2016. Despite being based on a verified purchase, it never showed as such, causing it to be almost invisible to shoppers, so in 2021, I deleted and resubmitted it. It was approved the same day, and over the next couple of years it amassed almost three times as many helpful votes as the next most helpful review, and became the top critical review of the book. (I have always given the book three stars.)

Sometime over the summer of 2023, Amazon removed my review with no notification or explanation.

When I discovered this and asked why, I was told it was for violating community guidelines. Despite repeated inquiries, I was never told which guidelines it allegedly violated so that I could address them. Knowing that the same review had been approved in the first place, I tweaked anything I thought could possibly be considered objectionable and resubmitted it.  When after almost a week it hadn’t been posted, with no approval or rejection (which usually happens within hours), I inquired about its status.  I was told that resubmitting a review after its removal by Amazon results in a ban from being able to review a product.

So now, despite being the clear subject matter expert on Lucky 666‘s subjects, and no reasons ever given for how my review violated any guidelines, I’m now unable to post any review of the book on Amazon. I was told this was to preserve customer trust and avoid bias.

Fortunately I have my own website. The text of that review follows.

The review

Lucky 666 is a brisk, well-written book, if a little purple in parts, but it raises an important question: however well written a biography might be, how many major mistakes and inventions can it contain before it stops being a work of nonfiction and loses its value as a biography?

Consider:

• The authors get the crew itself wrong, leaving an important regular crew member almost completely out of the book (flight engineer/top turret Thues), his job and expertise given incorrectly to another crew member (ass’t flight engineer/belly gunner Able), while adding a regular crew member who wasn’t (Dillman, substitute belly turret gunner on the 16 June 43 mission), among other crew mistakes.

• Drury and Clavin colorfully confuse the story of the B-17, #41-2666, from which Lucky 666 takes its title, describing it as a “hulk” resembling a “rotting skeleton” “languishing in the boneyard,” the origins of its “previous” name “Lucy” “lost to the mists of time,” that Zeamer’s crew restores to flight status. All of which would have surprised the 8th Photo Recon Squadron—which was flying 41-2666 for a month before Zeamer appropriated it—and Zeamer himself, since he’s the one who named the previously unnamed Fortress “Lucy” (after an old girlfriend at Langley) shortly before his last flight in it. What’s especially puzzling about such mistakes—and a number of others, big and small—is that the documents needed to correct them can be found in Lucky 666‘s list of sources.

• They badly misunderstand Zeamer and Sarnoski’s actual histories in the Southwest Pacific, and confuse the chronology of events bearing directly and indirectly on the crew’s story. Partly because of this, and in addition to it, elements of different personal experiences, missions, and events end up getting blended together into a strange hybrid.  Or, conversely, one person becomes four, with a single friend of Zeamer’s—Walt Krell—quoted as himself plus as three other people. Still others, like Zeamer’s purported mission with Sarnoski during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea—a mission which isn’t found in the squadron morning reports or Zeamer’s own flight log or official Individual Flight Record—are removed enough from the documentary record that they come off as pure invention.  The overall effect is an extended uncanny valley of alternative history in which the actual origin of the crew and other formative events are missed entirely, while others, even those as important as the first mission together of the nucleus of the Eager Beavers—which occurs months and a squadron late in Lucky 666 under very different circumstances—flirt with fiction.

• They repeat the decades-old but wholly untrue “screwups and misfits” characterization of the crew throughout the book, even as their own histories and bios of the crew members don’t support it.

• Based on my own conversations with his crew members, squadron mates, and conversations with his wife spanning fifteen years, Drury and Clavin fundamentally misunderstand the character of Jay Zeamer himself.

Lucky 666 does its best job as biography in giving a pre-war account of Zeamer. Sarnoski’s is good and gives a good representation of his personality, but by my reading misses the fact that Joe dropped out of school after eighth grade, spent his teens working the family farm, joined the CCC at 21, and went straight into the Army from there. It’s at that point, when the narrative shifts to the SW Pacific, that the book steers almost completely into alternative history. In the end, little of the story of the crew, or plane, presented in Lucky 666 after Zeamer and Sarnoski arrive in theater is accurate except in the broadest strokes.

It’s fair and valid to wonder what my own sources for all this are. That would be the now thirty years I’ve spent—and continue to spend—researching this compelling, historic crew. Besides considerable personal archival research, I had the privilege and honor of interviewing and corresponding with members of the Eager Beavers themselves, and the squadron mates who knew them best, before they passed away, as well as with over twenty family members of the crew, who have generously provided personal letters, diaries, photos, news articles, and personal mementos from the war from the various crew members. Besides that I’ve consulted heavily with respected historians of and experts on that theater of the war, the bomb groups and squadrons involved, the aircraft, and a wide array of topics related to the Eager Beavers’ war experience.

Obviously bad timing with regard to being able to interview those directly involved can’t be held against the authors, and there will likely always be more information that comes to light later, requiring an abundance of caution and humility when writing about real people and events. But that’s different from a failure to make use of the considerable sources that are available—or even all the source material you have—and that’s the iceberg Lucky 666 runs into. The limited list of essential official archival records in its bibliography goes far toward explaining the confusion, but ultimately the story it presents of the crew isn’t supported even by the list of sources that were used.

The question for potential readers, then, is what they hope to get from a nonfiction book. Again, Lucky 666 is a well-told yarn that does admirably and credibly convey the heroism of the crew on the “impossible” 16 June 1943 mission. Drury and Clavin are fine writers and compelling storytellers. But if a reader’s goal in buying a biography is to learn the real story about a subject—in this case, the actual circumstances of the formation of Jay Zeamer’s remarkable crew, and an accurate relating of their experience in the SWPA—that doesn’t happen here. Readers get only the authors’ convincing but much mistaken impression of what happened, leaving most readers incapable of knowing whether what they’re reading is how it really happened or not. To an unfortunately considerable degree, it’s not.

Clint Hayes

The remedy

For those wanting a corrective to Lucky 666, or simply to get the real story the first time, I’m happy to now be able to offer my own book.