On November 24th, 1941, Richard Gilman crashed his disabled Spitfire V-B at high speed into a mud bank near Shoreham Emergency Airport in Sussex, England. He was only 19 years old. The accident led to several operations, over a year of hospitalization and many more of recovery. The book you are holding takes the reader on an insightful journey through a collection of personal memoirs. It was a time of undeniable excitement and indelible pain. These stories are important because they help us understand a little of what war was like, how it felt .The survivors of the last World War are dwindling fast, and too soon there will be no one to remind us that wars are not solutions. Read the Kirkus review here: .