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Stephen Ambrose, copycat

To his credit, and unlike Ellis, Ambrose has now apologized, and he has promised to correct the situation for the next printing. (How will he do that? Add a footnote: "Oops! It seems I stole these passages from another writer"?)

Personally, I find this situation more repellent than Joe Ellis's lies about his service in Vietnam and in the anti-war movement. Ellis by all accounts writes good, reliable history, but he has this pathological little quirk that makes him want to inflate his own personal history. That I can understand. (How many of the stories we tell about our youth can stand up to the witness of somebody with a good memory who was actually there at the time? The step from embellishing the past to inventing a past is a very small one, though most of us thankfully never take it. Still, the world is full of examples. I can't tell you how many emails I've received over the past few years, asking why Uncle Bob or some other "Flying Tiger" veteran isn't listed on my roster of the American Volunteer Group.)

Ambrose, by contrast, stole another man's work and passed it off as his own. That's not pathology; that's theft combined with laziness and dishonesty. Here's what he wrote on page 164 of The Wild Blue:

Up, up, up he went, until he got above the clouds. No amount of practice could have prepared the pilot and crew for what they encountered--B-24s, glittering like mica, were popping up out of the clouds over here, over there, everywhere.

Up, up, up, groping through the clouds.... No amount of practice could have prepared them for what they encountered. B-24s, glittering like mica, were popping up out of the clouds all over the sky.

The ball turret was, as McGovern said, the most physically uncomfortable, isolated, and terrifying position on the plane. The gunner climbed into the ball, pulled the hatch closed, and was then lowered into position.

It was the most physically uncomfortable, isolated, and terrifying position on the ship. The gunner climbed into the ball, pulled the hatch closed, and was then lowered into position.

Here's what Fred Barnes wrote in The Weekly Standard:

IN 1995, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Childers, published a book about his uncle's B-24 crew in World War II. Entitled Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, the book was well received by critics. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post called it "powerful and unselfconsciously beautiful." It sold fifteen thousand copies in hardcover and remains available in paperback.

In 2001, Stephen Ambrose, perhaps America's most popular historian and one of its most prolific, also published a book that focuses on a B-24 crew in World War II. This crew's pilot was George McGovern, later a senator and Democratic presidential candidate. Entitled "The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany," the book got mixed reviews. But it nonetheless rose quickly on the best-seller list, ranking twelfth on last week's New York Times non-fiction list. The first printing was half a million copies.

The two books are similar in more than just subject. Whole passages in "The Wild Blue" are barely distinguishable from those in "Wings of Morning." Sentences in Ambrose's book are identical to sentences in Childers's. Key phrases from "Wings of Morning," ... are repeated verbatim in "The Wild Blue." None of these--the passages, sentences, phrases--is put in quotation marks and ascribed to Childers. The only attribution Childers gets in "The Wild Blue" is a mention in the bibliography and four footnotes. And the footnotes give no indication that an entire passage has been lifted with only a few alterations from "Wings of Morning" or that a Childers sentence has been copied word-for-word. So, for example, one six-paragraph passage in "The Wild Blue" is structured like the corresponding section of "Wings of Morning," with ten sentences nearly identical to sentences in Childers's book and one completely identical. All this is dealt with in a single footnote that cites pages 21 to 27 in "Wings of Morning" with no further explanation or credit....

ASKED ABOUT SIMILARITIES between "The Wild Blue" and "Wings of Morning," Simon & Schuster, Ambrose's publisher, issued this statement: "Stephen Ambrose's 'The Wild Blue' is an original and important work of World War II history. All research garnered from previously published material is appropriately footnoted." The publishing firm claimed the similarities involved only about ten sentences of description of technical matters and that the debt was adequately discharged in the four footnotes.

Childers has not mounted an effort to publicize Ambrose's use of his work; I heard about the similarities from a colleague, not from Childers, who actually assigns two of Ambrose's books, "Band of Brothers" and D-Day, in his classes. Childers said he looked up the index when he first got "The Wild Blue" and flipped to the parts where his work was footnoted. His first reaction was, "this sounds awfully familiar. It didn't make me mad. It made me disappointed." Childers said he hasn't written Ambrose. "What would I say?" he asked. "Shame on you?" He added he "doesn't want to go after Stephen Ambrose. The man has done an awful lot of good work."

And a flip of the virtual finger to Simon and Schuster, who apparently can no longer distinguish between outright theft and scholarly attribution. I wonder if Simon and Schuster would be equally broad-minded if somebody took The Wild Blue, quoted it entire, and published it under another title with a footnote citing Ambrose's book as a source.