Zeamer's Eager Beavers

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 always extolling their courage, it is a rich brew of myth and mistakes that has obscured the even more compelling reality.

Here for the first time is the true story, revealed in this collection of histories and biographies by the foremost authority on the crew. Over the past thirty years, author Clint Hayes has 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; consulted numerous experts on every facet of their war; and pulled the archival material essential to finding the full story—newspaper articles, school records, and hundreds of pages of personnel files, squadron morning reports and histories, and group orders.

The result is the most comprehensive picture possible of this remarkable crew’s story. Shorn of embellishment, the real history of the men of the Eager Beavers turns out to be even more incredible and inspirational than the fiction passed down for decades, and still.