Author Talk with Adam Makos | Tidal Wave

About the Book:

Operation Tidal Wave produced five Medals of Honor and remains one of the costliest missions in American airpower history. But the extraordinary story that began after the bombers crashed in the foothills of Romania has never been told in full. In TIDAL WAVE: The Pilots, the Princess, and the Enemy Ace—A True Story of Courage and Survival in WWII (Ballantine, on sale 11/3), Adam Makos brings that little-known aftermath vividly to life.

The Ploesti oil fields—the objective of the famous August 1, 1943 low-level B-24 raid—fueled the Axis war machine, making them one of the most strategically important targets of World War II. At a moment when energy infrastructure is once again central to global conflict, the story of how the Allies attempted to destroy “Hitler’s gas station” feels newly resonant. In TIDAL WAVE, Makos recreates the attack itself, and then shifts focus to what happened next: the fate of the American airmen shot down over Romania, and the extraordinary Romanians who chose to help them.

At the center of the story is Lt. Ernie Poulson, a young B-24 copilot whose plane crash-landed on the estate of Princess Ecaterina “Catherine” Caradja. By nationality, she was his enemy; Ernie and his fellow Americans had just bombed her country. But what she did next defied every expectation. As Makos widens the lens, we meet Catherine’s cousin, Prince Constantine Cantacuzino, Romania’s top ace who fights for the other side but will ultimately face a choice to help rescue the very Americans he faced in the air, and King Michael I, the young monarch working to pull his country out from under Hitler’s grip before it’s too late.

Drawing on newly uncovered sources, family archives, diaries, letters, and firsthand accounts, TIDAL WAVE brings Makos’s signature immersive, character-driven approach to one of World War II’s most legendary air campaigns. The result is at once a combat narrative, an escape story, and a deeply human account of courage, resistance, and reconciliation—asking what happens when the person you’ve been taught to see as the enemy becomes the one willing to save you..

About the Author:

Hailed by the Associated Press as “a masterful storyteller,” Adam Makos is the New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Call, Spearhead, and Devotion—now a major motion picture starring Glen Powell. The Los Angeles Times places him “in the top ranks of military writers,” a title earned through immersive research that has taken him from flying a World War II bomber to journeying into North Korea in search of a missing American aviator.