Or Go Down in Flame

“The engrossing story of an American professor’s quest to learn how his older brother was killed in WWII . . . many poignant moments” (Publishers Weekly).   “Black Thursday,” the second Schweinfurt raid, was the most savagely fought air battle in US history and a milestone in the course of World War II. On October 14, 1943, the US Eighth Air Force launched nearly three hundred bombers deep into German territory to destroy the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt, hoping this would bring enemy industry to a halt.   On that clear, sunlit day, hundreds of German fighters raced among the unescorted B-17s, guns blazing, knocking down plane after plane, each with ten men aboard. By the end of the day, the flight path of the Flying Fortresses was marked across the breadth of Germany by towering pillars of smoke from crashed machines, fiery tributes to six hundred lost airmen.   W. Raymond Wood was just a child when his brother was lost in the Schweinfurt raid, and the minute details of this book are the result of his multi-year effort to illuminate “Black Thursday” as no writer has before. He not only reveals the experience of the American flyers in this famous battle, but that of the civilians on the ground and the enemy fighters who flew against the bomber stream, including the Me-110 pilot who in all probability destroyed his brother’s plane with a rocket.   Illustrated with forty-eight pages of photos and original documents, this book examines the air war against the Third Reich, then brings the reader into the center of harrowing air combat, and finally chronicles the little-known operations after war’s end to retrieve and identify our dead.