The Navigator's Letter
The True Story of Two WWII Airmen, a Doomed Mission, and the Woman Who Bound Them Together
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A USA Today Bestseller, The Navigator’s Letter reveals one of the most audacious and overlooked World War II stories. It chronicles a dangerous U.S. Army Air Force campaign through the voices of two airmen bound by duty—and one woman, forming a deeply human narrative. A gripping blend of military history and war biography, it captures brotherhood, love, and sacrifice.
One of the riskiest air raids of World War II occurred on August 1, 1943, over the oil fields at Ploesti, Romania—Nazi Germany’s primary fuel source. The Allies believed that the destruction of Hitler’s oil refineries would shorten the war. Using an untested strategy, it was worth the gamble, but the mission did not go according to plan—with 53 aircraft and 532 crewmen lost, it was the costliest US air raid of the war.
A true story, The Navigator’s Letter is a tale of uncanny coincidences: two friends from the same small Illinois town; both joined the Air Corps; both became navigators; both were assigned to B-24 Liberators; both flew missions over Europe; both of their planes were forced down over Ploesti; and both went missing-in-action.
Intertwined with events of WWII, the story follows the two B-24 navigators coursing through wartime, both with ties to the same woman. Their lives unfurl with the Air Force’s darkest day, Operation Tidal Wave. It was the first-ever zero-altitude air raid followed by multiple high-altitude raids culminating in Operation Reunion, the largest evacuation by air in history with the Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group flying escort repatriating 1,162 POWs from Romania back to American air bases in Italy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this somewhat sluggish saga of friendship and survival, Dondi draws on a stash of hundreds of letters to bring to light the story of her father, Bob Cress, who survived a doomed WWII bombing mission over the Nazi oil fields in Ploesti, Romania. Bob and his friend John B. White, who was also the brother of Bob's girlfriend Polley back home in Illinois, were both assigned to fly missions over Ploesti. John's plane went down first, on August 1, 1943, during the disastrous operation Tidal Wave, the costliest U.S. air raid of the war, when 53 aircraft were lost. (Dondi writes that the oil fields were "a colossal land battleship, armored and gunned to withstand the heaviest aerial attack.") John was marked missed in action, and Bob and Polley exchanged letters about his fate—before Bob himself was also shot down over Ploesti several weeks later. Settling stoically into life as a POW, Bob made it his mission to find John, an ultimately fruitless task. While the book is full of unique insights—the letters, as well as two memoirs later written by Bob, reveal much about the situation on the ground in Romania in the final days of WWII—the author's overreliance on firsthand sources (with every primary quote in italics) can be a slog. It's a letdown.
