I'll Be Seeing You

Glowing fingers of grasping flame clawed the ball turret's armored window; I felt the heat through the cracked glass. Flames poured from The Phoenix's left inboard nacelle, blackening and consuming the wing. My electric system was shot out, the ball jammed. I was trapped, hanging from the belly of a B-17 Flying Fortress at twenty thousand feet and twenty degrees below zero. My nostrils burned from oily smoke and the cordite of hundreds of fifty-caliber shells that leapt from the guns. My foot pedals and the controls on my firing arms were dead, the hydraulics gone. Whether I'd live or die depended on Polansky or Carson, up in the waist. One of them would have to crank me up manually. Jack Jones, a man haunted by the loss of his B-17 bomber pilot father in World War Two shortly before his birth, travels back in time through a Native American portal with Blackfeet Medicine Man Alvin Tailfeathers and his coyote Leon. Together they are transported to 1942 America, where Jack trains before being assigned to a heavy bomber group in England and flying harrowing combat missions as a B-17 ball turret gunner. His time-traveling mission's goal will save one man's life while costing another his. This work of historical fiction by acclaimed military historian Rob Morris takes the reader through all aspects of training, combat, and the prisoner of war experience, ending with an 89-day forced winter march and a thrilling climax that has more twists and turns than a juking Messerschmitt being jumped by a P-51!! Filled with memorable characters, intense combat scenes, and humor, this new novel truly brings to the page what it was like to fly and fight in the American bomber war at a time when the odds of surviving 25 missions was one in three.