Wings of Morning - The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II

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Автор: Thomas Childers

Название: Wings of Morning - The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II

Издательство: Addison Wesley Publishing Company

Год: 1995

Формат: PDF

Страниц: 304

Язык: English

Размер: 39.8 MB

There are very few books written, and even fewer read, that will motivate or so move a reader to go to unusual lengths to want to know or try and understand who the protagonist of the story really was; who he must have been. This is just such a book, and this is no ordinary story. First, and foremost, it is a true personal account of one of thousands of American young men from a typical all-American small town of the 1940's, who had everything going for him, a bright future before him, sports, a steady girl, maybe even college. But the war in Europe and Pearl Harbor interrupted that future for Tennesseean Howard Goodner and the many like him. He stood on a train platform one morning and, like so many others, kissed his mother goodbye, assured her he'd be alright and went off to the army to become an aviator. But the story is not so predictable. Not everyone who trained could sit in that pilot or co-pilot's seat of the new B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, and Goodner became an aircrew radio operator. This amazing story is taken from the letters of Sgt. Howard Goodner to his mother, found, quite by accident, by Professor Thomas Childers locked in a desk, that Howard's mother, Childers' grandmother, had left for him upon her death. The letters, stuck for fifty years, in a drawer that must have been much too painful to open, describes in vivid detail the complete stateside training of a typical B-24 aircrew...the selection process, the daily routines, the nuances of the lumbering B-24, the incredible training accident rates and the midair accidents that Howard witnesses. Training accidents that kill 10-20 men at a time above the cotton fields of Texas.