Denny was a WW2 bomber pilot and reporter. I don't know how he was at his day job, but he's not much of a novelist. Robinson and Amandson hail from different strata of a small Pennsylvania mining town. Lt. Google is from California and know kung fu. Together, they're part of the 8th Air Force. It's 1945, and they just need to make it till the end of the war. Denny plays with history a little, making the wasserfall SAM and an elite unit armed with Me 262s more deadly then they actually were. The story ambles through meditations on the warrior ethos, and class and sex in the 1940s, before settling into a happy ending for Robinson, with his enemies confronted and killed, and peace made with the death of Amundson.