The Navigator’s Letter: The True Story of Two WWII Airmen, a Doomed Mission, and the Woman Who Bound Them Together

In this somewhat sluggish saga of friendship and survival, Dondi draws on a stash of hundreds of letters to bring to light the story of her father, Bob Cress, who survived a doomed WWII bombing mission over the Nazi oil fields in Ploesti, Romania. Bob and his friend John B. White, who was also the brother of Bob’s girlfriend Polley back home in Illinois, were both assigned to fly missions over Ploesti. John’s plane went down first, on August 1, 1943, during the disastrous operation Tidal Wave, the costliest U.S. air raid of the war, when 53 aircraft were lost. (Dondi writes that the oil fields were “a colossal land battleship, armored and gunned to withstand the heaviest aerial attack.”) John was marked missed in action, and Bob and Polley exchanged letters about his fate—before Bob himself was also shot down over Ploesti several weeks later. Settling stoically into life as a POW, Bob made it his mission to find John, an ultimately fruitless task. While the book is full of unique insights—the letters, as well as two memoirs later written by Bob, reveal much about the situation on the ground in Romania in the final days of WWII—the author’s overreliance on firsthand sources (with every primary quote in italics) can be a slog. It’s a letdown. (Feb.)