title: Or Go Down in Flame: A Navigator's Death Over Schweinfurt
author: W. Raymond Wood
description: not only details the events surrounding the death of one aviator during the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany in 1943, but also could be described as an introductory work in how to do research with WWII recordsextremely well researched account of the authors own private quest to find out the truth about his brother.Or Go Down in Flame would be useful to WWII historians interested in the bombing over Germany and to non professionals interested in researching relatives lost during the war (<i>Plains Anthropologist, Vol 41, No 158</i>)<br /><br />This is the engrossing story of an American professor's quest to learn how his older brother was killed in WW II and the process by which the body was transported to its final resting place, the family plot in Missouri. Lt. Elbert S. Wood, navigator on a B-17 bomber during a 1943 raid over Germany, was the sole member of the crew who did not parachute safely to ground after the plane was damaged. (Lt. Wood, wounded, was probably strangled by his own parachute lines.) The author interviewed surviving crewmen, visited the crash site and questioned German civilians who attended Lt. Wood's funeral in the small Bavarian town where his body was taken. He constructed an outline of his brother's military career and a moment-by-moment account of his last mission. In one of many poignant moments, Wood pays tribute to the town Burgermeister who went out of his way to give an American airman a dignified burial (German soldiers on leave served as guards of honor) "when this was not a popular or even safe course of action." The book may also be read as an exemplar of how to research the fate of an American combat casualty. (<i>Publisher's Weekly</i>)
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  # The Burning Eye
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  SOMEHOW, THEY HAD MADE
  
  
  IT
  
  
  
  
  
  Vessel Commander First Rank Galen Diettinger, of the Sauron
  
  
  Fleet Heavy Cruiser _Fomoria,_ stirred slightly in the command seat,
  
  
  waiting for the lag effect of jump to wear off. As his vision cleared,
  
  
  Diettinger realized he could make out more details of the bridge than he might
  
  
  have liked. Fire had blackened a third of the room, while smoke still drifted
  
  
  lazily in the red glow of the combat lights.
  
  
  
  
  
  Somehow, they had made
  
  
  it. In Diettinger's mind was an image of the Homeworld as they had jumped.
  
  
  Firestorms and mushroom clouds pockmarked the land. Even the seas roiled as
  the
  
  
  Imperial ships sought out the undersea cities. A great red wound ran along the
  
  
  main continent of Lebensraum as the Imperial assaults split the planet's
  crust,
  
  
  while in the space above, the bright lights of the homeland's hopelessly
  
  
  outnumbered fleet pulsed as each ship died. All but one.
  
  
  
  
  
  "Position,
  
  
  sir," Navigation a