Miss Fortune's Last Mission

Twenty-five years after his death, I wanted to know the things my father would not discuss about his time as a 19-year-old waist gunner in a B-24 bomber. I found the man who could tell me. He was Ray Noury, who flew with my father over Europe in late 1943; saved my father's life; and, after my wounded father was shipped home, became the lone survivor of a doomed crew that was shot down in February 1944. When I met Ray in 2013, only five months before his own death at age 90, he told me the story of a B-24 nicknamed Miss Fortune. Ray talked about Miss Fortune's crew members, their families, and a village that continues to honor the crew's sacrifice seven decades later. Ray's revelations took me across the country and over the Atlantic; through stacks of letters and pictures; and back to the confusion I felt as a child wondering why my father still was so wounded so many years after the surgeons repaired his shattered leg. Ray introduced me to his friend John Torrison, whose...