Operation Tidal Wave

The Bloodiest Air Battle in the History of War

By: Vincent dePaul Lupiano

Narrated by: Roy Worley, Robert Brinkmann

Operation Tidal Wave tells the story of the bloodiest air battle in the history of war. It is about 1,700 airmen who set out to bomb the oil refineries surrounding the city of Ploesti, Romania, on August 1, 1943. Success, they thought, would be a force in ending the war. Success, instead, was extremely limited, and 500 airmen were killed, wounded, captured, or interned. Negligible damage resulted at the Ploesti refineries, and a few months later, they were operating at 100 percent capacity. To show the asperity of the raid, five Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded, two posthumously.

©2022 Vincent dePaul Lupiano (P)2022 Rowman & Littlefield

Operation Tidal Wave

A very extremely and accurate book. Very well done and spoken. God bless the men of Operation tidal wave and this narrator.

lyrical…gauzy…random

fantastic miasma of the event 80 years later….downright terrifying! the sights, sounds, and jaw clenching terror is palpable!!! awesome book in its form and context.

Not Focused on the Actual Material

There's a lot of padding about the author's background and very basic things about WWII. Many passages could be made much shorter and more focused. It's hard to get to anything new that I care about. The narrator does a pretty good job, though.

Too much irrelevant information

I found that the early stages of the book had far too much random information. The author flitted from subject to subject, all broadly related to WW2 but utterly irrelevant to the North Africa air campaign and even less relevant to the Ploesti mission. I found myself rolling my eyes as he disappeared off on another dead end. There is a huge amount of repetition in the book, I lost count of the number of times that Colonel Smart was introduced, it was akin to a TV program that knows that it will have huge commercial breaks and so has to remind everyone of where the story is up to each time it returns. We also had a number of false starts on the actual mission itself. I would say around 10% of this book actually covers the events of August 1st 1943, the mission itself became something of an afterthought. Enough about the book, let's talk about the narration... the narrator was clear and easy to understand. He had a warm voice which enabled me to get through the book at all as it took on the experience of listening to an elderly veteran describing their war stories as a stream of consciousness. Where this fell down was the authors use of flowery language which seemed to send the narrator off into a wistful whispered reverence which frankly drove me insane! I would also say that for a book about WW2 someone should have picked him up on his repeated use of the word "luftwaff" rather than "luftwaffe", it may seem a petty point but it is wrong and he should have done better as the word was used repeatedly during the book. All in all I would recommend finding another choice for this subject matter.