“Zeamer’s Eager Beavers” Book Cover Design

Book Description

They are the most highly decorated air crew in American history.

Their last mission together was considered “an epic of courage unequalled in the annals of air warfare” by Fifth Air Force commander General George Kenney.

They were Jay Zeamer’s Eager Beavers, a B-17 crew based in the Southwest Pacific in 1943, whose true story has never been told.

Instead, to the degree they’re known at all, they’ve been miscast as a Dirty Dozen cliché—a renegade crew of misfits and screw-offs, the bane of their squadron and command, who only endure them because no one else will fly the missions they will. While true to their courage and dedication, it is a rich brew of myth and mistakes, continued in even recent popular accounts, that has unfortunately obscured the more compelling reality.

Here for the first time is the real story, revealed in this collection of histories and biographies by the foremost authority on the crew. Over the past thirty years, author Clint Hayes interviewed the surviving members of the Eager Beavers and their squadron mates; obtained letters, war diaries, photos, and personal knowledge of the crew from almost thirty of their family members; and consulted experts on every facet of their war. Most significantly, Hayes scoured not just academic and media archives but military as well, amassing thousands of pages of personnel files, official orders, mission and morning reports, squadron and group histories—without which the full story simply can’t be told.