A true story, The Navigator’s Letter is a tale of uncanny coincidences: two friends from the same small town in Illinois join the Army Air Corps in World War II.

Both become navigators. Both were assigned to B-24 Liberators. Both flew missions over Europe. Both of their planes were forced down over Ploesti in Romania, a target for Allied bombers that wanted to knock out Nazi Germany’s primary fuel source.

Jan Cress Dondi has written an account that captures the sense of the all-involving conflict that WWII became. It was a war that, once it began to rage, reached every small town, every family.

Dondi’s discovery of a footlocker filled with letters in her mother’s cellar said those letters reached out to her. “While the early letters revealed a prewar innocence, as they moved into 1943, reading turned to a curiosity of how war impacted family. As for WWII itself, I found how little I understood about this major event,” she wrote.

But the letters led the author on a quest that included interviews with the main characters and the people who knew them. She found and used a POW diary, memoirs from crewmembers, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. She dug up records from the National Archives, both American and German.

“At its heart, The Navigator’s Letter is a personal narrative,” noted Dondi. “It’s a true story about three youths growing up (in Hillsboro, Illinois) at the advent of WWII. The main characters, John B. and Bob (Dondi’s father), drive the story through Polley’s eyes—a journey that took two young men from the heartland of America to a cauldron of Hitler’s crude oil at Ploesti.”

Dondi’s description of the bombing runs over Ploesti, the heavily protected Nazi stronghold, reveals the horrifying fate faced by those flying planes at tree-top level into the teeth of German anti-aircraft guns.