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Jack C. Botts entered the Army
Air Force in June of 1943, upon graduation from high school. Botts was stationed at bases in Texas and Nebraska until July
of 1944, when he was transferred to Italy. Jack Botts was a crew member on a B17 Bomber in World War Two. On
his missions, Jack Botts bombed German controlled oil refineries and factories in Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria,
Romania, France, Italy, and Poland. In January of 1945, Jack Botts was sent back to the United States, where he served in
Washington, Wisconsin, and Nevada before separating from the Army Air Force, at the rank of Technical Sergeant. After
the war, Jack Botts was a journalist and then a professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Jack Botts is the author of Straight and level:
(growing up in the '40s); Whitestone: The Second Nebraska Cavalry; Home Place; Play Action; A pocketful of plums: (Jim
River days); and, The Language of News: A Journalist's Pocket Reference.
According to the book description,
Straight and Level “is a personal account of a North Dakotan who went directly from high school
in 1942 to Army Air Forces training and a B17 bomber crew in Europe during World War II. From old diaries, letters, records
and memory, the author recreates both the rigors of training and the panic and frenzy of combat missions.” According to the book description of Whitestone:
The Second Nebraska Cavalry, “During the Civil War, after Santee Sioux killed several hundred settlers
in the fall of 1862, residents of Nebraska and Iowa feared for their lives. Washington supplied encouragement, enough supplies
to muster a volunteer regiment of cavalry from each state, and a general to lead them against the Indians. This is the story
of that long summer campaign by untrained Nebraska soldiers-mostly boys between seventeen and twenty-enduring extremes of
weather and shortages of provisions before finding and defeating a large encampment of renegade Indians at Whitestone Hill.”
According to the book description of
Home Place, “A Nebraska rancher, trying to assist a car-crash victim, picks up a mysterious
compact disk and finds himself and his wife besieged on their ranch by a pair of mob killers. Without effective weapons, they
resort to an inventive defense. As a high plains blizzard rages, a beautiful Treasury agent joins forces with a deputy sheriff
in an attempt to rescue the ranchers.”
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