In Rocky Boyer's War, Allen Boyer offers a wry, keen-eyed, and occasionally disgruntled counterpoint history of the hard-fought, brilliant campaign that won World War II in the Southwest Pacific. Based in part on an unauthorized diary kept by the author's father, 1st Lt. Roscoe “Rocky” Boyer, this narrative history offers the reader an account of Allied air commander Gen. George Kenney's air blitz offensive as it was lived both in the cockpit and on the ground. During 1944, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur's forces fought their way from New Guinea to the Philippines, Kenney, discarding pre-war doctrine, planned and ran an “air blitz” offensive. His 5th Air Force drove forward like a tank army, crash-landing in open country, seizing terrain, bulldozing new airfields, winning air control, and moving forward. At airfields on the front line, Rocky kept the radios working for the 71st Tactical Reconnaissance Group, a fighter-bomber unit. Diaries were forbidden, but Rocky kept one-full of casualties, accidents, off-duty shenanigans, and rear-area snafus. He had friends killed when they shot it out with Japanese anti-aircraft gunners, or when their bombers vanished in bad weather. He wrote about wartime camp life at Nadzab, New Guinea, the largest air base in the world, part Scout camp and part frontier boomtown. He knew characters worthy of Catch-22: combat flyers who played contract bridge, military brass who played office politics, black quartermasters, and chaplains who stood up to colonels when a promotion party ended with drunken gunplay and dynamite. This is a narrative of the war as airmen lived it. Rocky's experience of life on the front line gives from-the-bottom-up detail to the framework of Kenney's air blitz. The author uses Rocky's story as a jumping-off point from which to understand the daily life, pranks, mishaps, and casualties, of the men who in 1944 fought their way over the two thousand miles from New Guinea to the Philippines. “Military regulations prohibited maintaining a journal or diaries in operational areas.... When reading excerpts from [Lieutenant] Boyer's diary, it's easy to understand why commanders did their best to discourage the creation of such documents. Certain themes reappear throughout the entries: poor living conditions for the enlisted troops and, conversely, favored treatment for the 'brass' in the form of extravagant housing and Australian women commissioned as officers to enable them to serve the commanders; absence of sex; [and] limited access to alcohol.... This book is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in tactical operations, especially in the southwest Pacific.” ―Air & Space Power History “Rocky Boyer's War is an ideal book for readers interested in the Southwest Pacific theater of World War II or the contrasting experiences of airmen in the Pacific and European theaters. More generally, Allen Boyer provides a salutary, empathetic study of the everyday lives of a neglected cohort of Second World War airmen.” ―Michigan War Studies Review “…An outstanding new work, Rocky Boyer’s War…will find its place among the great eye-level accounts of the Second World War.” – The Clarion Ledger “Allen Boyer has done a wonderful job bringing both his father’s story and the oft-neglected history of the Southern Pacific Theatre to life. His prose is beautiful, and his father’s diary is interesting, witty and heartfelt. “Rocky Boyer’s War” is worth a read.” – Yakima Herald “Readers will gain an appreciation of the full extent of Army Air Corps operations in the Southwest Pacific with Rocky Boyer’s War.” ―Military Review “This is an easily readable account of the Southwest Pacific air war woven together with the diary entries of a support officer who experienced that war. I recommend this to anyone interested in World War II USAAF history in general and to those who are interested in the Pacific air war in particular.” ―Strategic Studies Quarterly “It is a great read for everyone who wants to get a non-history book feel for what it’s really like to be a military pilot in wartime… I give Rocky Boyer’s War my highest 4-5 star rating.” ― Hot Toddy.com “…If you find yourself thinking ‘I know what happened, but what was it really like to be there?’ this book is for you.” ―Proceedings “New Guinea in World War II is far removed from the New York Stock Exchange seventy years later, but Allen D. Boyer makes the transition with aplomb as he expands upon his father's wartime diary. The resulting true-life Rocky Boyer's War will draw inevitable comparisons with Joseph Heller's fictional Catch-22. World War II students will appreciate Rocky Boyer's War for its uncompromising honesty and downright enjoyable narrative.” ―BARRETT TILLMAN, author of Whirlwind: The Air War against Japan, 1942–1945 “Put a copy of Rocky Boyer’s War on the shelf next to your copy of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The movement of the 5th Air Force from Australia to New Guinea and then to the Philippines and Okinawa in Worl