One of the last great memoirs of World War II, Into the Cold Blue is a riveting account of the air war over Europe, when hell was four miles above the earth.

A born daredevil, John Homan joined the Army Air Forces after the Pearl Harbor attack. By 1944, he was co-piloting a B-24 Liberator over Nazi Germany, raining death and destruction on the enemy. This first-person account of his harrowing missions—chronicling deadly flights through skies of red-hot flak bursts and airmen bailing out with parachutes aflame—will leave readers staggered by the determination and grit of World War II aviators.

Fighting a fierce enemy in the air seemed the perfect way for Homan to channel his restless, energetic spirit in wartime, but he could never have imagined the horrors that awaited him. During a vast operation over Nazi-occupied Holland in September 1944, his plane was punched full of holes, its left tail shot away, and a tire blown to bits. Homan wondered how he could possibly survive. The young lieutenant and his exhausted crewmates braced for a nearly hopeless emergency landing. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, waited the sweetheart he thought he’d never see again.

With wit, warmth, and astonishing clarity, John Homan conveys the skill and heroism of the “Mighty Eighth” Air Force in the most perilous theater of history’s greatest air war.