Americans in a World at War

Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper

By: Brooke Lindy Blower

Narrated by: Nancy Peterson

A vivid narrative of an ill-fated Pan American flight during World War II that captures the dramatic backstories of its passengers and, through them, the impact of Americans' global connections.

On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways' celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York's Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war.

Combat soldiers made up only a small fraction of the millions of Americans, both in and out of uniform, who scattered across six continents during the Second World War. This book uncovers a surprising history of American noncombatants abroad in the years leading into the twentieth century's most consequential conflict. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the US war effort.

©2023 Brooke Lindy Blower (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A new take on the run-up to WW2

The author takes a new tack on explaining the United States -- before WW2 & in the first months of WW2 -- by focusing on several passengers (& the pilot) of a PanAm flying boat that crashed in Lisbon in 1942. Each biography is interwoven in the book, which sometimes makes for a confusing read as an audiobook, but its worth puzzling through. The US was of course a diverse society in the 1920s & 1930s, and the joy of this book is experiencing the different facets the author chooses to highlight. Since most of us history readers can fall into the fallacy that the past was very homogeneous when compared to our current world. The aircraft angle is alittle bit of a McGuffin that allow Blower to choose among the passengers for interesting angles on that prewar world & the first months of US involvement in the war. The narrator is also excellent.

Heroes, Villains and A Moment in Time

History is seldom neat and tidy. And that was the case here with the men and women who were on the Pan Am Clipper in its last flight. Each had their own reason to be there, and the outcome of those reasons differed by as little as a few feet, and where you were sitting on that plane as it came to land.

The author did a wonderful job of selecting from the history of those passengers and crew, and gave a wonderful portrait of the world in the years leading up to, and including much of, World War II.

Looking at the book on Amazon, I know there were at least some pictures of the people written about, and I think the Audible presentation would benefit from a PDF having at least that information, and any other pictures that may have been in the hardcopy.

If you enjoyed this book, I would also recommend “Stranded in The Sky“ by Philip Jett. That story covers the multiple Pan Am Clippers that were en route when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It is not on Audible, but definitely worth sitting down to.