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Vanishing Point: The Search for a B-24 Bomber Crew Lost on the World War II Home Front
In Vanishing Point, award winning journalist and author Tom Wilber pieces together the largely forgotten story of the bomber, Getaway Gertie, and an eclectic group of enthusiasts who have spent years searching for it. At the height of World War II, a B-24 Liberator bomber vanished with its crew while on a training mission over upstate New York. The final hours and ultimate resting place of pilot Keith Ponder and seven other US aviators aboard the plane remain mysteries to this day. The tale is at once a compelling instance of loss on the World War II American home front and a more extensive, largely unreported history. Pondera 21-year-old from rural Mississippiand his crew were tragically unexceptional casualties in the monumental effort to recruit and train an air force en masse to counter the global conquest of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. More than fifteen thousand American airmen and, in some cases, women burned, crashed, or fell to their deaths in stateside training accidents during the wartheir lives and stories shuffled away in piles of Air Force bureaucracy. Read more