Norwich connections

Recommendation: if you want to read a really good book about airmen in World War II, read Wings of Morning: the story of the last American bomber shot down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers. I just finished it and found it mesmerizing from beginning to tragic end.

The Norwich connection?

In November, 2008, while on his second visit to me in London, Henry took a train (by himself!) to Norwich to do some family history research and had a wonderful time. In addition to the family stuff there, he enjoyed seeing the general sights, including their very impressive cathedral. He wants to go back and do more family history touring, and I'll accompany him this time.


It will have a special meaning for me after reading the book. The airmen featured in this marvelously detailed history were stationed near Norwich at the end of the war.

Mr. Childers is a professional historian whose area of expertise is the German side of World War II. But in Wings of Morning he tells the story of his uncle's B-24 crew. Using large collections of letters, painstaking research into official documents, and interviews with veterans from the same bomb group, he paints a richly detailed, and inevitably heartbreaking, picture of his uncle's time in England and of his final mission.

Reading the tragic story of Mr. Childers' family's loss, I was reminded yet again how lucky I am that my father survived his service (his missions were undertaken in a smaller bomber, but he lived much the same life, and in the same area of England, that was described in Wings of Morning). And also how wonderful that our mother saved Dad's journal, letters and papers, so that I could have the satisfaction of undertaking the same kind of research, on a much smaller scale, that consumed Mr. Childers.

I don't really need another reason to want to re-visit the U.K., but now I have one.

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I actually have read Mr. Childers' books in the wrong order. Some months ago we got a new book of his in at the library and I was intrigued enough to take it home to read. It's called Soldier from the War Returning: the Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II. Since it's also about, to some extent, his family's experiences, I knew a bit of what to expect when I checked out Wings of Morning. I also knew I was in for a good read—although he's not a novelist by trade, Mr. Childers really knows how to tell a story.

The newest book is a very sobering look at the costs paid by soldiers who fought in this "good war." And how there can really never be any such thing.