The Education of a Fighter Pilot

"The Education of a Fighter Pilot" is a personal biography written by Austin L. "Toss" Olsen that covers nearly four years of his life, ages 17 to 20, during which he trained to be a fighter pilot in World War II - and shot down five Japanese airplanes.

Olsen was on a team of five fliers - replacement pilots sent out to the Pacific. The five saw combat; two perished, one was shot down and became a prisoner of war, and Toss and a fellow pilot completed their service as the war ended.

To write the book, he relied on 144 letters, postcards and telegrams that he had sent to his parents while he trained for some two years in six states and then finally served aboard the aircraft carrier Belleau Wood in 1945.
This book tells the details of his training, of his flights in combat, and of his friendships, some of which were shattered when his comrades died during the war.

The day he shot down four planes, he had been fired on earlier - by a fellow pilot. The bullet holes that were evidence of the friendly fire were just inches from his cockpit.

His first inclination was to use the correspondence to write a work of fiction; he was already the author of two novels: "Corcho Bliss," published in 1972 by Simon & Schuster, and "Apache Ambush," published in 2000 by Kensington. But Olsen chose to use the letters and add his recollections to tell the real story of what he went through to become a pilot for the Navy, and how he was able to pay for his "education" by shooting down five airplanes, including a kamikaze that was headed low on the water against a U.S. destroyer with a complement of more than 200 sailors on board.

As he explained, the letters did not contain everything that happened: "Regulations prohibited revealing the details of where I was, or what I had done - and I myself was not always candid."