It details the lives and World War II experiences of pilots, bombardiers, navigators, radio operators and gunners flying B-24 bombers of the U.S. Army Air Force against Nazi Germany.

With the odds of surviving all 35 missions as low as 50 %, the bomber crews flew during dangerous daylight hours, in risky tight flying formations, and despite bad weather and assaults of heavy, deadly, flak from ground-based German anti-aircraft guns.

[4][5] Revealing the sources of plagiarism in The Wild Blue, Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

[5][7][8] The use of italics to indicate some of the text was copied from other writer's works, however, might have been sufficient to avoid charges of plagiarism at the time, and in subsequent editions Ambrose addressed the issue.

Perhaps best known of Ambrose's work's is a lengthy history of Dwight Eisenhower The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography (published in 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject.

[9] Focusing on the real attraction of The Wild Blue, Kennedy White House aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that Dr. Ambrose "combined high standards of scholarship with the capacity to make history come alive for a lay audience.

While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus.

His opposition to the Vietnam War[11] stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative.

[13] In the divisive congressional era of the early 70's, McGovern's Hatfield-McGovern Amendment to bring a quicker end to the war had already been defeated in Congress by the time he was nominated before a divided party as the Democratic candidate for President against the incumbent Richard Nixon in 1972.

[14][15] According to one source, the crews experienced an alarming casualty rate of slightly over fifty percent due to the dangers of daylight bombing, training flights, and other factors.

For the better known Memphis Belle, a B-17 bomber, in her first three months of missions flown from Bassingbourn, England, her 8th Air Force Group experienced an even more astonishing casualty rate of 80%.

"[2] Faced with lengthy flights, the pilots sometimes struggled with a wheel that had no power steering and were forced to adjust and interpret control panels that could be complex, and that sprawled across the front console in a confusing array of dials and meters.

The crew could urinate only through two relief tubes, one forward and one aft, but due to the extreme cold and heavy layers of clothing, this could be a slow, painful, and difficult process, where the men could risk frostbite.

Making it a somewhat easier target for ground-based anti-aircraft, it also had a lower ceiling and lacking the strength of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, it could tolerate less damage.

Unfortunately, the planes were scattered by too many cumulus clouds and though they lacked cohesion, still faced severe fire from German ground forces and air defenses.

[29] As detailed expertly by Ambrose, the B-24 bomber's chief pilot and commander, George McGovern, received the Distinguished Flying Cross for making several difficult landings after returning from his bombing missions in damaged planes.

On only his second bombing run on December 15, 1944, the windshield of McGovern's B-24 was broken by a piece of flak that might have ended his life, missing him by inches as it passed by his left shoulder, yet he continued on and completed his mission undisturbed.

Losing altitude, the bomber crew threw ammunition, guns, oxygen tanks, flak jackets, and other items out of the plane to reduce weight.

Unable to return to Italy, McGovern flew to a British airfield on Vis, a small island in the Adriatic Sea off the Yugoslav coast that was controlled by Josip Broz Tito's Partisans.

The short field, normally used by small fighter planes, was so unforgiving to four-engined aircraft that many of the bomber crews who tried to make emergency landings there perished.

[18] But McGovern successfully landed, after he and his co-pilot Rounds braked strongly but carefully at the beginning of the short runway, until the plane stopped, causing rubber to burn and tires to shriek.

[33][34] McGovern's 35th mission from Cerignola on April 25, 1945, the last of the 15th Air Force's requirement for a combat tour, was against heavily defended Linz, Austria.

The sky was black and red with flak, and McGovern's "Dakota Queen", named after his wife Eleanor, was hit multiple times, resulting in 110 holes in its fuselage and wings and an inoperative hydraulic system.

"[37] Kirkus describes McGovern's love for debate in High School, his desire to obtain a quality education, and the great importance his father, as a member of the clergy, placed on serving one's fellow man through hard work and discipline.

[38] Richard Pearson of the Washington Post wrote that Ambrose's sentimentality and nostalgia concerning his subject and characters may have been the result of his feelings after completing his history of Eisenhower, as he "thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism".

[39] Dr. Ambrose considered himself a hero worshipper, and once remarked to a reporter "that he came to this form of history from...childhood memories of returning World War II soldiers.