Named the Fashion Book of the Year by Ivy Style, John Slemp’s Bomber Boys – WWII Flight Jacket Art presents over one hundred WWII painted bomber jackets, depicted in stunningly crisp photographs, each documented with the airmen who wore them. As we honor the 80th anniversary of D-day, this masterful coffee-table book is the most comprehensive visual record of A-2 flight jacket art ever produced and is one that general readers and military aficionados alike will find worth cherishing.
Winner of several prestigious international design awards including silver in the Indigo and Graphis Design Competitions, it was short listed for the ADC NY Annual Design Awards, received a BlueInk starred review, and has over 50 Five-Star Reviews from readers. Bomber Boys – WWII Flight Jacket Art is also now the basis for an immersive exhibition at the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach, Virginia. With all the accolades, we can understand the interest in a documentary that is rumored to be in the works with Georgia-based production company Craig Miller Productions.
The book is divided by theaters of war offering the jackets’ history, profiles of men who wore them accompanied by contemporary photographic portraits, along with the garment’s fashion influence through the years, information for collectors, and tips on how to care for the jackets.
During WWII, the jackets were often painted with illustrations, many that served as “mobile signposts reflecting the distinct mortal challenges every flyer faced.” The number of bombs painted on a jacket, for example, correlated to the number of missions the flyer completed. Symbols, like a swastika painted on the bomb, indicated where the payload was dropped. An open parachute showed that the flyer had to bail out, etc. Illustrations were sometimes reproductions of nose art painted on the planes. Women depicted in the classic Rita Hayworth calendar pose, Disney cartoons, and tigers all served to promote a sense of unity among men who were unlikely to survive the war.
In addition to the vibrant paintings gracing the flyers’ jackets, Slemp uses letters, flight logs, wartime photographs, military badges and more to recreate a portion of the flyers’ lives and to honor their poignant memories. Reading this offering is like opening an old chest forgotten in some attic and finding unexpected riches inside.
The book is available at the Smithsonian, the National Museum of the United Air Force, and the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth in Savannah, GA, among many others. It is also available on Amazon and directly from the author at WWIIBomberBoys.com. John Slemp resides in Tucker, GA.
To get a taste of Bomber Boys, listen to WWII Veteran Lewis Herron’s account here.
Bomber Boys – WWII Flight Jacket Art includes:
- Jackets representing all the theaters of the war.
- Smithsonian, National Museum USAF, 390th Memorial, San Diego Air and Space collections represented among others.
- 27 Jackets from private collections including rare artifacts.
- The book is 12×12 in size at 398-pages and is suitable for middle-schoolers.
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- WWII Mustang Pilot Paul Crawford, who flew a total of 29 missions with Claire Chennault in China in 1945.
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- Author & Photographer John Slemp
