Goodbye, Liberty Belle: A Son's Search for His Father's War

I was absolutely amazed that this book had never been reviewed in the seven years since it came out. This is truly a magical book, one that would appeal to a broad audience. It is first and foremost a story of the author's father and the father's 15th Air Force B-24 crew, particularly of the fateful mission during which their plane, the Liberty Belle, is shot down in present-day Yugoslavia. It recounts the adventures of the Merritt crew after their rescue by Partisans, some frightening, some comical, laced with the uncertainty of the tenuous alliances formed by the different ethnic groups and their relationships with the Allies or the Axis, both, or neither. But it is much more than a story of a bomber crew that bails out in unfamiliar territory in wartime. It is also a detective story. J. Merritt decides to seek out the old members of his father's crew, using old telephone directories and contacts, and also to find out more about his father's experiences after being shot down. To do this, he tracks down people in Yugoslavia who in turn help him track down men and women who helped the young airmen after they fell out of the sky that fateful day. He writes of the searches, the meetings, and of his decision to return to the site of his father's adventures of forty-plus years ago. And this brings up the third story in this intricately-woven book. It is the story of a son's attempt to get to know his father. Together the two decide to make the trip to Yugoslavia together, and it is a journey which, one feels, will bring the two men closer. Like many fathers and sons, the relationship has been frought with reticence on both sides. The generational divide has kept the two men, who obviously love and respect each other, from forming the deeper bond of solid friendship. So 'Goodbye Liberty Belle' is much more than an aviation war story. It is a story of a search for and reconnection with the past, of tracking down young men grown old and breaking bread with them. And it is a story about a son and a father sharing an adventure that one hopes will bring them closer together. Merritt's trade is as a writer of magazine articles, and his prose has the polished, spare utility of a man comfortable with expressing himself in few words and gifted enough to chose those words well. Sections of the book are woven together cleanly--a section on the fateful day of the crash flows seamlessly into a modern-day interview with the tail gunner long assumed dead, followed by a section on the trip to Yugoslavia the father and son take in 1986. This is a triumphal piece of writing. It is all at once a great war story, a detective story, and a story of a father and son. Merritt keeps the reader wanting to know how each of the stories play out, and he does it with grace. You will love this book.