Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island, Race of Aces, & Indestructible

Hello and welcome to my little corner of the internet!  My name is John R. Bruning, I am the author or collaborating writer of twenty-five books, including these three Hachette Book Group titles, Fifty Three Days on Starvation Island, Race of Aces and Indestructible. I’ve been writing on military history, counter-terrorism and espionage topics for over thirty-five years, starting with my time at computer game companies Strategic Simulations Inc (SSI) and Dynamix Inc.’s Aces series.  I left the game business in 1996 to begin a full-time writing career.  In 2005, I embedded with 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry when the Volunteers deployed to post-Katrina New Orleans. A few years later, I embedded with 3rd CAB’s TF Brawler (Marne Air!) and 162 Engineers at FOB Shank and FOB Leatherneck, Afghanistan. The Department of Defense gave me the Thomas Jefferson Award for best article by a stringer in 2011 for an article I wrote about a helicopter precautionary landing called, “We’re Not Leaving You Brother!”

I live and write in rural Oregon, where I reside with my two kids, a Jordanian rescue dog, and a very spirited Turkish Van who has more Instagram followers than I do.

Thanks for stopping by, and for those of you who’ve read some of my books already–thank you. You have given me an incredible life and career, one I never would have dared to dream about when I first started this crazy adventure  thirty years ago.

Our Latest Book is Now on Shelves Everywhere!

Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island

August 1942:

When you’re a year removed from lecture halls and your fraternity house, and you find yourself 180 miles south of nowhere in the middle of the Pacific, told to launch off a make-shift aircraft carrier with a catapult that will fire you off the deck at a 45 degree angle into a crosswind while piloting a combat aircraft you’ve had less than 30 days to learn to fly…and if you survive the launch, you’ll fight the best combat aviators in the world who have been shooting down planes since you were on your high school JV teams.

You’re going to be living in the jungle, slowly starving on captured food stocks. You may be five ten, a buck fifty now, but if you survive, you’ll be lucky to be a hundred and twenty pounds.

When you’re not in the air every day, you’ll be sniped, bombed, shelled, strafed, and mortared. The enemy’s ground troops are a few thousand yards away, preparing to overrun your make-shift, shell-pocked airfield that in itself is a hazard to use.

You’ll be exposed to jungle diseases not even known to Western medicine yet. You’ll be wracked with malaria, doubled over with dysentery. Your aircraft’s oxygen system will fail and poison you. A hit in the wrong place, and you’ll be covered in superheated engine oil. If you get shot down, you’ll face sharks at sea and death by torture at the enemy’s hands in the jungle.

And some light bird who doesn’t know the basics of overwater navigation, who refuses to share your circumstances, has just told you your mission: buy time with your lives. Die hard. You have one ace in the hole: USMC Captain John L. Smith is your commanding officer. With him at the tip of your spear? All the other stuff is just noise.

The Leaders:

Captain John L. Smith: An Oklahoman, OU ’36. A fighter pilot who inspired a nation, but never shed burden of the men he lost in battle.

Captain Marion Carl: An Oregonian, OSU ’38. The dead eye ace of air combat, considered the best pilot in the Corps.

Major Richard Mangrum: A Washingtonian, UW ’28. The consummate quiet professional, tasked with a mission only a handful of pilots could carry out. Together, they would stem the Japanese tide in the critical hours of World War II. This is the incredible true story of these legendary Marines and the men they led to victory against overwhelming odds.

Fifty-three days of this to go…then you can go home. For thirty-four years, I’ve wanted to tell this story. Thanks to Hachette, it is in bookstores everywhere and on Amazon. Available in hardback, on Audio/Audible, Kindle & Ebook.

Praise for Fifty-Three Days:

Race of Aces:

It started with a bet in the fall of 1942 and grew into a national obsession.  Eddie Rickenbacker catapulted to fame in 1918 to become America’s Ace of Aces of the Great War. He returned home from the Western Front to be feted as the hero of his generation, and he used his fame to build a business empire few ever are able to achieve. So when Eddie challenged the fighter pilots of General George Kenney’s jungle air force to beat his score of 26 planes destroyed, he sparked a race among the best of the best to be the next Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s World War II Ace of Aces. What followed was one of the most extraordinary events in American history: The Race of Aces.

The Race:

Three Years

Five men.

Three Medals of Honor.

One survivor.

Praise for Race of Aces

https://www.wsj.com/articles/race-of-aces-review-when-lightning-strikes-11578672169

Indestructible

In December 1941, Paul Irvin Gunn, the middle-aged operations manager of Manila-based Philippine Air Lines, woke up to find his world turned upside down.  The radio brought news that the Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor, and he knew it would only be a matter of time before the Philippines was attacked. His beloved wife, Polly, and their four children lived right beside one of the main U.S.A.A.F. airbases in the Philippines.

War was coming to his family’s adopted home, and they were right in its path.

Before he could fly them to safety, General MacArthur drafted him into his air force. Suddenly in uniform, wearing captain’s bars, Paul Gunn became the general’s go-to pilot for the most important missions around the Philippines.

On Christmas Eve, Paul Gunn received an order that would change his family’s lives forever. He faced a choice: execute a dangerous yet vital mission, or defy the order and fly his family to safety.

He tried to do both. While in the air on his secret mission, his family fell into Japanese hands.

This is the story of how one man went to extraordinary lengths to save his family from the clutches of the Japanese Army, and how his desperate rescue attempts led to a revolution in air warfare that changed the course of the Pacific War.

Based on years of research, hundreds of hours of interviews, tens of thousands of pages of original documents, letters, diaries, blueprints and reports, Indestructible takes you from deadly air battles of the South Pacific to the Lord of the Flies world of the infamous Santo Tomas Internment camp through the eyes of the Gunn family as their love, resolve and devotion to each other sustained them through their incredible ordeal.

Praise for Indestructible