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Zusatztext "If you want to read one book to understand how a humbled America rose to defeat mighty Japan! you hold that book in your hands." (James Bradley! author of Flags of Our Fathers ) Informationen zum Autor Craig Nelson is the author of four previous books, including The First Heroes and Let's Get Lost . His writings have appeared in Salon , The New England Review , Blender , Genre , and a host of other publications. He was an editor at HarperCollins, Hyperion, and Random House for almost twenty years and has been profiled by Variety , Interview , Manhattan , Inc. , and Time Out . Klappentext Immediately after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to restore the honor of the United States with a dramatic act of vengeance: a retaliatory bombing raid on Tokyo. On April 18, 1942, eighty brave young men, led by the famous daredevil Jimmy Doolittle, took off from a navy carrier in the mid-Pacific on what everyone regarded as a suicide mission but instead became a resounding American victory and helped turn the tide of the war. The First Heroes is the story of that mission. Meticulously researched and based on interviews with twenty of the surviving Tokyo Raiders, this is a true account that almost defies belief, a tremendous human drama of great personal courage, and a powerful reminder that ordinary people, when faced with extraordinary circumstances, can rise to the challenge of history. History Runs Away... On October 14, 2000, I received a letter from an eighty-two-year-old man with the most distinctive handwriting I'd ever seen. Each stroke, a carved and italic spider line, looked as though it had been painfully chiseled into the page. The writer explained that "as a rural farmboy, I augmented my modest allowance by operating a trap line before catching the school bus. In skinning my catch, i.e., badgers, coyotes and skunk, I froze my fingers. Now, as an octogenarian, I'm paying for it with non-operative finger joints." The letter was from Harry McCool, the navigator of plane four in the covert operation that became the first U.S. victory of World War II. Harry wrote me in answer to a questionnaire I had sent to every surviving member of his mission almost sixty years after it had taken place. I'd become convinced that their astounding story was one of the greatest moments in American history-a story that, until earlier that year, I'd never heard. In World War II my father served with the Army Air Forces in New Guinea while my mother was an air traffic controller in Atlanta; later one of my uncles would become a career air force navigator. They filled my childhood with stories of daring raids, secret missions, and the astonishing bravery of what I learned, much later in life, were men barely out of their teens. Then Vietnam happened, and we no longer talked so much about my uncle's job or my parents' service years. It wasn't until I came across the story of Harry and his fellow airmen in an old issue of American History magazine that those tales from my childhood suddenly took on historical significance. That mission was the birth of the U.S. Air Force-a key part of my family's past-and I didn't know a thing about it. Embarrassed and ashamed about my ignorance, I started asking around. It turned out that almost anyone who had been alive during World War II was as vividly aware of the story as Americans of my generation recall precisely where they were when John Kennedy was assassinated. Yet, with the exception of diehard World War II scholars and buffs, it seems to have completely escaped the attention of most other Americans today. Some areas of national amnesia deserve immediate attention, and I believe this is one of them. I saw the story as one of ordinary people who became heroes, but in...
