A born daredevil, John Homan joined the Army Air Forces after Pearl Harbor. Three years later he was co-piloting a B-24 Liberator over Nazi Germany, raining death and destruction on the enemy. This first-person account of his harrowing adventures--flying through deadly skies filled with red-hot bursts of flak, watching airmen fall from the sky with parachutes aflame--will leave you staggered by the courage and grit of those young warriors.

Fighting the enemy in the air seemed the perfect way for Homan to channel his restless, energetic spirit in wartime, but he could never have imagined the horrors that awaited him in September 1944. Part of an airborne armada over Nazi-occupied Holland, his plane punched full of holes, his left tail shot away, a tire blown to bits, Homan wondered how he could survive his mission. The young lieutenant and his exhausted crewmates braced for a nearly hopeless emergency landing, while half a world away waited the sweetheart he thought he'd never see again.

With wit, warmth, and astonishing clarity, John Homan conveys the skill and heroism of the "Mighty Eighth" Air Force in the most perilous theater of history's greatest air war.