While scores of books have been published about the atomic bombings that ended World War Two, little has been written about the personal lives of the three men who led the raids. Paul Tibbets, Tom Ferebee, and Ted “Dutch” Van Kirk exemplified what Life Magazine meant in 1942 when it called the B-17 pilot, bombardier, and navigator “the three musketeers of the Army Air Forces.” A former navigator-bombardier and pilot himself, Harder provides a rare insider’s look at who these three fellows were, how they were trained, what they meant to each other, and finally how everything coalesced into the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.
On June 14-15, 1919, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown became the first to fly the Atlantic non-stop in their modified Vickers Vimy bomber from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Cliveden, Ireland—eight years before Charles Lindbergh’s epic flight from New York to Paris. We follow the two officers through terrifying Great War combat; both would be shot down and survive as prisoners of war. While incarcerated, both independently dreamed of winning Lord Northcliffe’s £10,000 Prize for the first non-stop Atlantic crossing. Through a combination of luck and their competitors bad fortune, Alcock and Brown launched themselves into aviation immortality.
Air Force navigators and bombardiers have long labored under the shadow of pilots—their contributions undervalued, misunderstood, or simply unknown to the general public. This was especially the case with the non-pilot officer aircrew in the Vietnam and Cold War-era B-52 Stratofortress. Of the six men who operated the bomber, three wore navigator wings—two were also bombardiers; the third an electronic warfare officer. Executing the nuclear war strike plan or flying Southeast Asia conventional bombing sorties without them would have been impossible. This book reveals who these men were and their roles down in the “Black Hole,” told by one of their own.
Over a ten-year period, Harder researched and wrote this four-volume regional history, told through the eyes of the immigrant Norwegian Marcus Nelson family. Letters, photographs, and other period documents provide a fascinating, personalized record (think looking down at a detailed core sample taken from the time) of early settlement in eastern Aitkin County, Minnesota from 1892 to the eve of World War Two. Readers should know all proceeds from these books go to support the Aitkin County, MN Historical Society.
