Return from Berlin: The Eye of a Navigator - Hardcover

Grilley, Robert

9780299185008: Return from Berlin: The Eye of a Navigator

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299185001 ISBN 13: 9780299185008

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

During the summer of 1944, the now-legendary American Eighth Air Force was engaged in a ferocious air battle over Europe to bring the Allies victory over the German Third Reich. This is the story of one B-17 navigator and his crewmates, men who faced extraordinary danger with a maturity beyond their years. This vivid and detailed account of combat flying and its psychological toll also recalls the beginning of Robert Grilley's development as a painter of international renown, as he spends his off-duty time drawing the peaceful Northamptonshire landscape around Deenethorpe airbase. Wakened with flashlights on their faces in the predawn hours, he and his crew repeatedly face the Luftwaffe in battles five miles high, flying through flak ""so thick you could get out and walk on it."" Stretching their stamina to the limits, they succeed time after time in their missions to bomb munitions works, railyards, the Leuna synthetic oil plant at Merseburg in castern Germany, the V2 rocket research center at Peenemunde on the distant Baltic Coast, and even to strike Hitler's capital city, Berlin. But Grilley finds interludes of unexpected grace and restoration on his days off, making serious drawings from nature at the neighboring Yokehill Farm. There he slowly cultivates a friendship with a curious eight-year-old, the lively child Elizabeth, who becomes for the combat flyer a symbol of survival.

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Review:

"Return from Berlin has wonderful dialogue and will appeal to a general audience. It has great significance for the psychology of war." - Joseph V. Smith, University of Chicago

About the Author:

Robert Grilley is professor emeritus of art at the University of Wisconsin Madison. A respected figure painter and teacher, he has shown his work at museums and galleries throughout the United States, including a large retrospective at the Wichita Museum. "

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