Honest John; The Autobiography of Walker M. Mahurin

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. [2], 313, [3] pages. Nice inscription by author on half-title page. Walker Melville "Bud" Mahurin (December 5, 1918 - May 11, 2010) was a United States Air Force (USAF) officer and aviator. During World War II, while serving in the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), he became a noted flying ace. Mahurin was the first American pilot to become a double ace in the European Theater. He was the only United States Air Force pilot to shoot down enemy planes in both the European and Pacific Theaters and the Korean War. During World War II he was credited with 20.75 aerial victories, making him the sixth-highest American P-47 ace. He was credited with shooting down 3.5 MiG-15s in Korea, giving him a total of 23.25 aircraft destroyed in aerial combat. On May 13, 1952 he was shot down by North Korea and captured. Mahurin spent 16 months in a prisoner of war (POW) camp. During his time as a prisoner of war, he was confined to a small cell, fed only enough water and food to keep him alive, and subjected to brainwashing, a new brutality unknown to the free world. He was forced to endure subfreezing conditions with minimal clothing, interrogations sometimes lasting all night, and being deprived of sleep and threatened with execution if he did not answer questions. Bud Mahurin, at last, agreed to write a "confession" so full of inaccuracies and implausible information that any reader would know it was fiction. His experience in enduring brainwashing techniques provided the U.S. with invaluable material to develop survival training courses. HONEST JOHN is the dramatic unvarnished autobiography of Walker "Bud" Mahurin, an American fighter ace who performed extraordinary feats of skill and bravery in shooting down more than twenty enemy planes in two wars, only to be called a traitor by many after he was forced to sign a germ-warfare confession by the Chinese Communists. In his own words, Col. Mahurin recalls the youth from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was the leading American ace in Europe until his Thunderbolt was shot down over France, who escaped to fight again in the Pacific and returned in 1945 a much decorated war hero. When hostilities broke out in Korea in 1950, Col. Mahurin wangled his way out of his Pentagon desk job and soon, under the code name of "Honest John," was flying against the Midges over Communist skies. Then one fateful day in May, 1952, while perfecting the F-86 dive-bombing technique he himself had pioneered, his Sabre jet was hit by ground fire and crashed in a North Korean rice paddy. Thus began Col. Mahurin's ordeal, an experience which few Americans have encountered and fewer still have survived. For over a year he was kept in solitary confinement by his captors, interrogated almost constantly and subjected to a veritable arsenal of mental pressures and "invisible tortures" as the Communists sought their elusive confession. In harrowing detail he relates his attempt at suicide and his devices for resisting while still maintaining sanity.