Return from Berlin - The Eye of a Navigator
During the summer of 1944, the legendary US Eighth Air Force was engaged in a ferocious daytime bombing campaign over Europe. This book is the memoir of a B-17 navigator and his crewmates, men who faced extraordinary danger with a maturity well beyond their years and who found themselves far from their American homes and based in the English countryside in Northamptonshire. His war in the air, flying deep into enemy territory, surviving intense enemy anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighter attacks, portrays the confused emotions of a young man at war. Wakened with flashlights on their faces in the predawn hours, he and his crew repeatedly faced the Luftwaffe in battles five miles high, flying through flak 'so thick you could get out and walk on it'. They stretched their stamina to the limit time after time in their missions to bomb munitions factories, rail yards, oil plants, the V2 rocket research centre at Peenemünde and Berlin
The book also relates how the author befriends a local farming family and strikes up a very human relationship with their eight-year-old daughter, a relationship that becomes a symbol of survival.