Wings of Morning. Significant Sentences. 09

Significant sentences from Wings of Morning by Thomas Childers, the story of the last American bomber shot down over Germany in WWII, and a vivid re-creation of participation in the war.

"Howard came home on December 10, 1948." p. 231.

"...a bored young clerk produced a folder marked TSGT Goodner, Howard G. from a bank of filing cabinets behind him." p. 233.

"But I could follow the trail of the Richard Farrington crew to discover what I could about an uncle I had never known, but whose presence had hovered over me from my earliest memories, and I would find answers to the questions that had haunted my family and others since the spring of 1945." p. 235.

"Each mission folder contained a copy of the briefing notes, maps of the routes in and out, strike photos, and a final summary of the mission. p. 235.

"Studying the thin mimeographed sheets of the 466th's operations diary, I was staggered by the cruel ironies of the mission." p. 236.

"...looking at him, the survivor [he had parachuted from the plane], and wondering, he always thought, why he had come back and their son or brother or husband had not." p. 240.

"But above all they remembered with deep bitterness that a decision by the command pilot--against the pleas of his own navigator and mickey man and others throughout the formation--took them directly over Regensburg." p. 242.

"Everywhere I saw reflected back at me the same tableau of love and pain that I had known in my own family--the same snapshots from the last visit home, the scrapbooks full of yellowing newspaper clippings and curling photographs, the boxes of V-mails, the same heartbreaking telegrams, kept neatly in their torn envelopes." p. 246.

"And as we talked and wrote and visited in the months that followed, the crew came alive again, one by one, borne on the wings of memory, and we found ourselves bound together in a chain of love and loss that passed beyond the generations." p. 246.