John Ambruster shares Tailspin

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Saturday, Aug 5, 2023  1pm - 2pm

Location

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Details

In November 1943, in the skies over Nazi Germany, a wounded American tail gunner, Gene Moran, lay in the severed tail of his Flying Fortress bomber. The mangled wreckage plunged four miles toward German soil. His parachute shredded by enemy fire, Gene awaited the inevitable.

The cartwheeling tail section slammed into a forest and dumped Gene onto the cold ground. He was alive! Gene fell four miles without a parachute and survived. But his ordeal had just begun. In the next seventeen months, Gene would endure some of the worst episodes of the American prisoner of war experience in occupied Europe, including the infamous "Hell Ship" and European Death March.

For more than sixty years, Gene said little about one of the most extraordinary stories of World War II until he met the author, John Armbruster. John, a close friend of the Moran family, initially refused to write Gene's story. Twenty years removed from a journalism degree and writing high school basketball stories for newspapers, John couldn't imagine taking on such significant work. But the author agreed to the project when one of Gene's daughters told John, "He'll do it, but only if you write it." The journey of telling the story becomes a story itself.

Tailspin ​chronicles Gene's unbelievable World War II survival saga. It will also show an elderly man finally coming to terms with the cruelties of a war that would haunt his entire life.

About the author:

John Armbruster remembers falling in love with the Flying Fortress airplane when he was nine years old after reading his first "grown up" book: Flying Fortress-The Illustrated Biography of the B-17s and the Men Who Flew Them. Today, a copy of that book sits on a shelf in John's home. Who could have guessed this World War II airplane buff would one day befriend a Flying Fortress tail gunner and write his story?

The author earned a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began his career writing environmental science stories for Earthwatch Radio (Sea Grant-University of Wisconsin). He later wrote for two Wisconsin newspapers covering general assignment news for the La Crosse Tribune, and later, writing sports stories for the Marshfield News-Herald.

John returned to UW-Madison and earned his secondary education degree-social studies. He later completed a masters of education degree at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Since 1993, John has taught a variety of history and government courses to middle and high school students, including Advanced Placement courses in American and European history.

John lives on a small farm in the heart of the Driftless Region in Southwest Wisconsin. He has two sons, Matthew and Joe. His late wife, Carmen, died in 2012.