The Tomahawk Warriors, a crew of nine who perished in a 1944 B-17 Flying Fortress crash in England, was a mystery of WWII until explained in this book. It would have lain in partial obscurity if it were not for the author's initial involuntary involvement. As a child, he witnessed what would become a dogged determination in his lifetime later to tell this story. As the faint light of dawn was breaking the morning of August 12, 1944, a crippled American B-17 bomber flew perilously close over the roof of the author's house in Southern England. Around 30 seconds later, it crashed and exploded. In 2016, the author, David E. Huntley, after almost a lifetime, came across the story of the crew known as the 'Tomahawk Warriors' and recognized it as the accident he had witnessed as a child.
He started his own research and began asking himself many questions about the disaster. How did this plane crash and why, particularly in that location? For what reason was the plane misnamed 'The Tomahawk Warrior' through all those years? What strange circumstance led the author to come into possession of the navigator's diary that no one knew even existed? Why did one airman not take his place on board that day and become a part of the 'missing airman' legend?
Despite the coincidence that the plane of the 'Tomahawk Warriors' and the plane of Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. crashed on the same day; Huntley revealed a further significant link between them. This incident adds a further little-known aspect about the Kennedy's in American history.
Based on Declassified Secret Operational Records, analysis of other official and unofficial records, the author's personal observations on the day of the accident, and his pursuit of other facts, those mysteries became fully resolved. This story provides a distinct understanding of the immense courage those young 20 to 26-year-old American airmen displayed. Mission after mission, they climbed aboard their craft and carried out their respective duties at 28,000 ft in sub-zero temperatures, hoping their electric-heated protective clothing would not short out during the 9 to 10-hour flight. They prayed that flak and enemy fighters would give them that 70 percent chance of getting back home.
The book offers vivid descriptions of those who got shot down, baled out, and died or got captured to spend the rest of the war as POWs.The narrative places its emphasis on the lives of the heroes who served in WWII and their loved ones who have grown up in their shadows. He obtained a posthumous honor to the deceased crew, as well as a Permanent Commemorative Marker, and brought relief and closure to the descendants' relatives. This is not a post-mortem of wartime machinery, but a window into the lives of some heroes who sacrificed themselves for a cause, as well as a personal insight into the familial relationships with their loved ones at home.
England and the rest of Europe are trying to recover from WWII and also cope with a belligerent Soviet Union intent on dominating the Cold War. An executive of a British engineering company, Donald Harvey, is co-opted in the early 1950's by a joint project of the CIA and British Secret Service MI6, to assist in tracing the whereabouts of a missing WWII high level Nazi, SS general Hans Kammler. This war criminal had been responsible for the design of death camps, and the sealing of the Warsaw Ghetto. As one of Germany's most senior SS officers, Hitler had personally placed Kammler in charge of all production of secret weapons programs including the V1, V2, and jet aircraft production as well as the development of ultra-secret super weapons.
In tracing this wartime criminal through three continents, Harvey is constantly torn between his sworn endeavor and his conscience. He knew the Nazi had never been tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in absentia, and he wondered why? Was it because he had escaped with technology for which the West and the Soviets would be willing to ignore his war crimes, in return for his allegiance? This is the conundrum facing Harvey as he follows the dangerous trail of his quarry through one international sequence after another.
Donald Harvey's conscience is also tested with the fact of his own love interest with Alijca Kozlowksi who was a survivor of wartime atrocities against the Polish, and Jewish populations by both Russia and Germany. It is further tested and his resolve to hunt down the Nazi is intensified when Alijca's Polish uncle is brutally murdered by a Russian assassin in a peaceful and bucolic English town.
This author brings the story to a startling and climactic conclusion by providing a plausible explanation as to the fate and final whereabouts of the war criminal. Interestingly, in these final chapters, it also provides a certain nexus to the early development of the apartheid system in South Africa. This aspect in itself, will be a revelation to students of history.