Stephen Ambrose, the American author of the bestseller Band of Brothers , has been accused of stealing whole passages of his latest World War II epic from another book on the same subject published in 1995.
Several lines and, in some cases, whole sections of his book The Wild Blue appear to have been lifted from Wings of Morning, written by the respected American history professor Thomas Childers.
Childers's book told the harrowing story of the fate of his uncle's B-24 crew. It sold 15,000 copies in hardcover and is still available in paperback in the US.
Ambrose, a celebrated popular author following the huge success of Band of Brothers, brought out his own book last year. It also focuses on a B-24 crew in World War II, but the pilot at the centre of the story is George McGovern, the senator and former Democratic presidential candidate.
Ambrose's book had an initial print run of half a million and received a mixed reaction from critics. Nevertheless, it was ranked 12th on last week's New York Times non-fiction list.
Now an American publication, the Weekly Standard, claims the books have more in common than their subject matter. Whole passages in Ambrose's book mirror those in Wings of Morning and many phrases are repeated verbatim, it says.
Page 83 of Childers's Wings of Morning reads: 'Up, up, up, groping through the clouds for what seemed like an eternity ... 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.'
Page 164 of Ambrose's The Wild Blue reads: '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.'
Ambrose has published biographies of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, but his popularity as a historian stems chiefly from Band of Brothers , which was turned into a 10-part television series and shown on BBC2 last year. It tells the story of an airborne company that lands in France on D-Day and battles on until the end of the war.
Ambrose's publisher, Simon & Schuster, said: '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 house says that only about 10 sentences of technical description are involved.
It is true that the plots of the two books differ. Wings of Morning tells of a B-24 crew that flew out of England at end of the war. Childers wrote the book after finding letters and photographs sent home by one of the crew. The historian interviewed the lone survivor and finished researching the book three years later.
Ambrose's book concentrates on McGovern, a bomber pilot based in Italy with the 15th Air Force and a close friend of the author.
Childers said that he was disappointed when he first picked up Ambrose's book, thinking 'this sounds awfully familiar'.
