Wings of Morning. Thomas Childers. Significant Sentences. 04.

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.

"Somewhere in England"
"Daylight precision bombing is the name of the game...and that means high-altitude formation flying." p. 48.

"Rain became the dominant element in their lives." p. 59.

Impressions of the British: "Everything seemed grimy, encased in soot,and the people appeared as gray as their surroundings." p. 60.

"...he wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time that day, what he, Howard Goodner from Cleveland, Tennessee, was doing in a cold, dimly lit hut in the flatlands of East Anglia." p. 63. [RayS. Note: Howard Goodner was the uncle of the author, Thomas Childers.]

"The Wings of Morning"

"Takeoff and assembly were nerve-racking, dangerous phases of any mission, and the planning had to be meticulous." p. 67.

"...sending up approximately one hundred aircraft at almost the same time in an area the size of greater Philadelphia." p. 67.

"The men stumbled out of their bunks, frozen, scared, and, despite the hour, wide awake." p. 70.

"All along the road between the huts the silent shapes of men passed in the gloom...." p. 71.

"...in the truck, with its smell of metal, gasoline and wet canvas, there was little talk." p. 71.

"...they were all thinking the same thing: when the weary crews straggle back to this mess hall this afternoon, another mission behind them, will I be among them?" p. 72.

Wings of Morning. Thomas Childers. 03

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.

"Gone for a Soldier," cont.
"The trip to Massachusetts from Colorado meant another tedious cross-country train trip, long, mind-numbing days in the stuffy coaches, sleeping upright in the threadbare seats, drinking coffee in the dusty stations between trains...." p. 15.

"Like so many men who flew combat in the war, neither Farrington nor Regan had set foot in a plane before entering the service." p. 21.

"Including training casualties, which were stunningly high, almost 40% of all who entered pilot training failed to complete it." p. 21.

"The B-24 was not built for comfort." p. 21.

"It was almost as difficult after a ten-hour flight to crawl back out." p. 22.

"The B-24 was not pressurized and the crews had to wear clammy, ill-fitting rubber oxygen masks for hours at a time." p. 24.

"They were learning a lot about each other, about their roles on the aircraft, learning to master their jobs and to trust in the skill and judgment of each man in the crew." p. 25.

Somewhere in England

"...endless army processing, the hurry up and wait...." p. 36.

"...even the dull presentiment of dread, like the first hint of a toothache--with which the day began, was utterly stifled, deadened by drab army routine." p. 36.

Britain: "On a small, crowded island where forty-five million people live, each man learns to guard his privacy carefully--and is equally careful not to invade another man's privacy." p. 41.

"Someone once said that the British and Americans are two people separated by a common language." p. 42.

"The whole of Great Britain--that is, England and Scotland and Wales together--is hardly bigger than Minnesota." p. 43.

Wings of Morning. Thomas Childers. 02

Significant sentences from Wings of Morning by Thomas Childers, the story of the last American bomber shot down over Germany in WWII.

Why "significant sentences"? The single sentence can contain the essence of a paragraph, of a chapter, sometimes of an entire book. In this blog, the reader will find the single sentences that I believe are most interesting in Thomas Childers' Wings of Morning, the story of the last U.S. bomber shot down over Germany in World War II. Each of these selected sentences, while obviously related to preceding and following sentences, can stand on its own merit as an idea. As Boswell said of one of Dr. Johnson's works, "...almost every sentence...may furnish a subject of long meditation."

"For all those who did not come back, and those who miss them still." p. 1.

Epigraph: "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;/ Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me./ If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me./ Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day...." Psalm 139. p. 2.

"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war...but about love and memory and sorrow." Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried. p. 2.

Gone for a Soldier

Thomas Childers: "...I have followed the trail of the letters and photographs all across the U.S., to New York and Illinois and Florida to Maine and Mississippi and California." p. 4.

Thomas Childers: "The letters led to other letters in other houses, buried in the vaults of memory for about fifty years and to sheaves of documents in Washington and St. Louis and Montgomery." p. 4.

Thomas Childers: "The letters led to a deserted air base in England." p. 4.

Thomas Chlders: "The letters led to a field in Germany." p. 4.

Thomas Chilers: "...into the world of momentous events he had only read about or seen in the newsreels." p. 8.

Wings of Morning. Thomas Childers. (01)

Significant sentences from Wings of Morning by Thomas Childers, the story of the last American bomber shot down over Germany in World War II. (01)

RayS: This book is nonfiction written as if it were fiction. The author uses all of the techniques of fiction to re-create the lives of the crew of the Black Cat, a B-24 bomber flying bombing missions over Germany. It is my favorite book about World War II.

Introduction from the Cover

On April 21, 1945, the twelve-member crew of the Black Cat set off on one of the last air missions in the European theater of WWII. Ten never came back. This is the story of that crew--where they came from, how they trained, what it was like to fly a B-24 through enemy flak, and who was waiting for them to come home.

Historian Thomas Childers, nephew of the Black Cat's radio operator, has reconstructed the lives and tragic deaths of these men through their letters home and through in-depth interviews, both with their families and with German villagers who lived near the crash site. We follow Childers's uncle, Howard Goodner, a Tennessee college kid, as he awaits his draft notice, trains, and travels overseas to join the 8th Air Force in its fight over the flak-filled skies of Germany. We meet Howard's crewmates: young men from Manhattan and Brooklyn, Pittsburgh and Peoria, St. Louis and New Jersey. Sons, brothers, and fathers--most scarcely more than boys themselves--they left everything behind to join the war effort. Wings of Morning re-creates the lives of these men in battle and on leave, at play and under fire, with a compelling combination of narrative craft and detailed historical investigation.

Interlaced with the story of these men is the author's search for answers long denied his family. A week before the air war in Europe ended, the Black Cat was shot down over Regensburg. The families of the crew received KIA and MIA telegrams in the midst of the joyous celebration of V-E Day. Desperate for further information, they wrote letter after anguished letter to the War Department but, caught in the chaos of the war's end, they could learn nothing more. Fifty years later, Childers continues the quest, and in so doing unearths confusion about the exact number of crash survivors and ugly rumors of their fate at the hands of the German villagers. His search to determine what really happened to the crew of the Black Cat leads him to the crash site outside of Regensburg to lay the mystery to rest.

Thomas Childers is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. His previous work has explored the German resistance, the political culture of Germany and the language of German politics.

Twelve Moons of the Year. December 04. Concluded.

Significant sentences from The Twelve Moons of the Year by Hal Borland, a chronology of the New England seasons. With December 04, Hal Borland's book consisting of an essay for every day of the year concludes. Hope my readers enjoyed Hal's vivid impressions of the changing New England season as much as I did. By the way, a used copy of this book costs $95.00 on Amazon.com. RayS.

"Chickadee: this bird is more than the sum of its anatomical parts; a lively spark of personality; can be a ham actor, a bully, a wheedler, and acrobat; loves a human audience and comes to the dooryard feeder as much for companionship as for a snack; an entertainer, it is all pro, the feathered song-and-dance performer who gets, and deserves, top billing on the winter circuit of the dooryard feeders." p. 352.

"...leaf-fall complete, the earth is all open now to the starlight." p. 353.

"...on a brittle night." p. 353.

"It is an illusion, of course, but the December stars seem twice as brilliant as those of June...."

"We should be able to glimpse eternity through those sparkholes in the blanket of the long night; perhaps we do; where else is such an order, such an eternal pattern, as in those stars that light the winter sky?" p. 353.

"December day: You eat breakfast by lamplight, hurry off to work in demi-dawn, and get home in darkness." p. 354.

"We are wise; we are sophisticated; believing that because there was a yesterday, there will be a tomorrow; we take it on faith: last year and last summer are sufficient proof that another year, another summer lie ahead." p. 355.

"...heartening, both in its repetition and it its enduring truth--as long as the sun shines, rain falls, water flows, and green leaves work their miracle, there is life, there is hope." p. 356.

"Time has no divisions, save as we make them." p. 356.

"Earth and sun and time proceed in their cyclic rounds, and only man presumes to summarize." p. 356.

"...year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a part of the infinite whole." p. 356.

"...'now' itself has no meaning without a yesterday and a tomorrow." p. 357.

Twelve Moons of the Year. December 03.

Significant sentences from The Twelve Moons of the Year by Hal Borland, a chronology of the New England seasons.

"We know again the long winter nights when the moon rides over a white world and the darkness thins away." p. 348.

"Year to year we remember the short days and we tend to forget the long nights of moonlight and starlight, when it seems one might stand on a high hill and touch the Big Dipper." p. 348.

"Ice and stormy wind are inevitabilities, but they pass even as the leaf and the blossom, equally inevitable in their own season, ripen and are gone." p. 349.

"The cold verity of winter completes the cycle of the seasons." p. 349.

"Even such a simple thing as a snow flake or an ice crystal is, in a way, a fragment of universal truth. The infinite variety within a six-fold pattern is beyond human achievement. The power in an ice crystal manifested in winter dwarfs the energy in a man-fractured atom." p. 350.

"Even so rudimentary a thing as a root, a seed or an insect egg is an expression of insistent vitality, of life itself...life, which will persist whether man is here to see it or not...and occasionally, we catch a glimpse of its elemental meaning." p. 350.

"...Christmas, not a mass or a sermon, but a secular festival to the innocence of children and the goodness of mankind." p. 351.

"Christmas: What we celebrate is the birth of a child into a time of dissension and oppression and a world of cruelty and suspicion, one who grew up to teach peace and justice and love of fellow man...as simple as that." p. 351.

"Christmas: But what we are really celebrating is the obscure birth of one who lived, and died, for a simple creed--peace, justice, and love of fellow man--so simple that we still find it difficult to accept complete; we celebrate the hope, the dream." p. 352.

"On a cold day, a chickadee needs its own weight in food to keep the inner fires burning." p. 352.

Twelve Moons of the Year. December 02.

Significant sentences from The Twelve Moons of the Year by Hal Borland, a chronology of the New England seasons. December 02.

"...December, the counterpart of June, reminds us that elemental ice is the twin of fire." p. 343.

"And man, privileged to know the year whole and complete...." p. 343.

"White birch. Its bark provides a usable paper, tinder for fires in the wet woods, enough nourishment to save man or beast from starvation; and from it came the canoe, shaped and sheathed by the tough, enduring bark itself before man adapted cedar and canvas and, eventually aluminum, to the same purpose; wigwams were roofed with that bark, and buckets and boxes were made from it. In the springtime the rising sap of the white birch was boiled down, like maple sap, for a syrup and a sugar that sweetened the woodsman's diet and disposition. White grace of the birch. White beauty in a drab, gray world." p. 344.

"If snow comes wet and clinging, it accents the clean, simple structure of every tree." p. 345.

"Of all the winter birds the clown of the lot is the nuthatch. He doesn't know that a bird can't go down a tree trunk head-first. No variation, nothing approaching a melody: just 'yark,yark, yark,' always in the same key, always the same note. Not quarrelsome, or noisy or pilfering. A good neighbor, and welcome winter guest, and he eats his full share of noxious bugs the year round." p. 346.

"For the pines and their whole family were old when the first man saw them, millions of years old...even at a time when millions of years had no meaning." p. 347.

"...we are reaching for reassurance, for the beauty of the living green but also for that green itself, the green of life that outlasts the gray winds, the white frosts and the glittering snow of winter." p. 347.

"The pine, the spruce, the hemlock, the fir--all those conifers that know no leafless season--have been held in special favor when man would have symbols of life that outlast all winters." p. 347.

"In our latitude we know that every year brings this time when not only the candle but the fire on the hearth, figurative if not literal, must burn at each end of the day." p. 348.