The Navigators Letter From Author Jan Cress Dondi The Birth Of Zero Altitude Air Raids

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Hello and good morning.

Good morning, how are you?

Absolutely fantastic and very excited to share a conversation with you because you deal with something here that I gotta tell you I've had to deal with it my entire life because my mother had two brothers that were navigators and they turned up missing over Korea.

Oh my gosh, that's incredible. So this story really speaks to you.

Yes, it does. And it's one of those things where prayers come at you in little bit pieces at a time.

And this is just definitely one of those where it's like, I wonder if this is the way my mother felt because my even grandmother never talked about it.

Nobody ever talked about it.

So amazing, so amazing. I can't believe the connection you have with this.

Well, I mean, how is it that you were able to even put a story together and where did you get the stories?

Because, I mean, that's the one thing I even learned with my father who fought in World War II. They didn't talk.

They didn't bring it and they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, you come back another day, okay? And then that day never came.

I will tell you, my father would answer any question you asked him.

He didn't brag about it. He wouldn't bring it up.

But if I wanted to know, and I was a curious little kid, and I will tell you it started out instead of bedtimes, instead of fairy tales, I got bedtime stories of dive bombing stucas and daring escapes from prison of workamp or interrogations by

Aryan officers.

It just grew into something that I've known all my life.

So now with your father being a part of this as well as your uncle, did you ever go out and tip the doghouse over and pretend that that was going to be your jet fighter so that you could go out there and fly an airplane?

Well, you know, interesting. I did, I did go, I did fly in one of the last two flying.

And that was an amazing thing. And I guess what I went in there to do was to feel what a 20 year old would feel like with the air breezing through the waste windows.

You know, they're open windows so that she guns could go out and I only went up to 2000 altitude.

I can only imagine 24,000 feet where it's freezing cold. It gets to minus 60 up there. And you have to wear an oxygen mask. You have to wear your head piece.

You have a hot heat suit and you're connected tethered by three lines to the airplane. So you can't go very far, although the navigator had to go between his spot downstairs up to the cockpit back and forth.

So he had to sort of go both places mom did talk about that that she would say that Teddy and Ray would not be able to go up there and see anything because they were in the back.

And it's like, you know, it's like, wow, how do you fly blind? They just did son. They just did.

Well, they didn't have GPS. I got anywhere. My father tells a story of going across the Atlantic at night facing hurricane force winds where there were no stars to take a star site so that he could figure out where he was.

No GPS. But he would say a little prayer for a little opening in the clouds and he would get it and then he could figure out where they were.

But he actually hit a dot on the map after 12 hours of flying over the dark ocean in daycar North Africa.

So then how do you put your personal experience in that because I mean, I wouldn't be able to silence the voices inside my head being in an atmosphere like that with all that wind.

Well, it's true. I it was hard to figure that out. And I don't know how they figured it out. But you know, they they went through.

It was freezing cold up there. They went through flock when they went over the target. The Nazis had it timed to altitude. So a direct hit could send a plane down and they would see their buddies go down.

It was it then when they left the target they had any one of nine's or up to one 90's fighters German fighters attacking them with machine guns shooting to kill.

And then you know if they if a hydraulic line burst it have fires on board that they'd have to fight those fires so that they could get the plane home.

So it was fearsome up there. It was scary. And they came home and when they landed they gave them the guys were given a shot of whiskey to sort of bring them down from the tension.

So they would walk to their tents at night and they passed the empty tent of their buddies that you know didn't make it home. And that's probably a surreal feeling.

They go home they go back to their tent and they write a letter home wanting to know about gossip who married who who's going who's dating who they just wanted to de-stress and relieve all that tension of the day because they had to go back up the next day.

You got those letters and the only reason why I say that is because that is the one thing that's missing from this modern age is the physical handwriting of the people that were here before us and I that is like my weakness in life.

I can't get enough of those letters.

Well, I was fortunate enough to find a foot locker of probably five or 600 letters written in my mother to family back home and it was a treasure trove.

And as I read them, I felt like I've got to do something with these. This is important stuff. This is not only did it tell the personal side of them, but they would give hints.

They were the censors for their groups because they were the navigator. They were the smart ones. They were the censors so they could put little clues in there.

I was upstairs today and I saw some statue that might be in Illinois and the statue in the town. I would know where it is and I could figure out where they were, but that wasn't good enough.

I would go to the National Archives. I went through mission reports, operations reports, bomb rip diaries, Air Force diaries, official documents of mission reports and I kind of fed it into a chronology of the letters and that's how I could create this letter or this book.

It was a letter putting all this stuff together. The story chronicles the entire US campaign to destroy Hitler's fuel source at Poleski beginning to Operation Reunion where the Tuskegee Airmen were flying guard as a repatriated 1200 prisoners of war.

But I've got it with these two men who experienced the whole campaign.

You know, you just hit something here that is so up to date with what's going on right now and this is going to be a big conversation starter and you said fuel stations. That's exactly where they are right now with Ukraine and Russia.

I mean, and you have the writing and the letters and the story to go before that so that we can understand where we are.

So I'm so glad you said that because Hitler went into Poland the exact way that Putin is going into Ukraine.

The exact same thing, but it's history repeats itself.

Yes.

And you know, that's a very, you know, I haven't been asked that question and I was waiting for somebody to ask that one and it's so true, so true.

Well, my question is that I want to know how you were able to get the pace of this book down because you're not rushing anything through us.

You're not trying to stuff a bunch of information into us.

You allow us as readers to take our time and to truly digest what's going on here.

Well, I will tell you it's easy when you've got two men that told me everything to say.

I mean, they together with the National Archives, but piecing it together.

I started this out years ago and I started out telling my cousins what their uncles, what amazing things their two uncles did.

And then one of them said that one of the guys is a good reader. He said, you know, this is a better story. You need to take it further.

I had to, it was too big to fat because it had a lot of personal stuff that nobody else cares about, but family.

So I took it to a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and asked him to read it to see if it was worth going further.

And he said, yes, but then I said, well, what do I take out because it's too big?

And he said, I wouldn't take anything out, but that wasn't the answer I wanted.

So he said, go ahead and print the book for your cousins and then take out stuff.

So we took out stuff that would really mean something to other people.

And I think I've put together between the U.S. Archives and the German Archives and the chronology and journals from family members, memoirs, food members, telegrams of missing in action.

Both of these guys were shot down over the same target months apart.

Both of these guys were from the same small town in Illinois.

They both joined the Air Corps, Army Air Corps. They both became B-24 Navigators, one for the 8th Air Force, one for the 15th.

They were both led their groups into combat, and they were both shot down over Ploesti months apart.

It's just an incredible story, but I will tell, I will say, it's a story of American courage and sacrifice of duty and love and of innocence irrevocably lost.

Please do not move. There's more with Jan Creston, he coming up next.

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The name of her book, the Navigators Letter. We are back with Jan Creston.

Did you, when you were going through these, these personal writings and these letters, did you run into what I call a dear future reader moment?

And I'll give you a good example of this because it just happened yesterday because we've had 10 inches of snow in Charlotte.

And it said the last time that it happened was in 2004, because I'm a daily writer, I went back to 2004 when that storm hit.

And it literally says, I'll see you in 32, I'll see you in 30 years. No, it was 22 years that I returned. Did you go through the same thing?

That's a very good question and it's a little complicated because I think I can answer a lot of different stories that that came up.

So in 1943, when Operation Title Wave was just about to start and my uncle was on that one, my father was in navigation training in Houston.

And there was a hurricane in Houston that killed a bunch of people.

They usually used the guys to tether down. They didn't have any advance worrying because there were U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico.

And so they couldn't wait a radio silence. You couldn't radio ahead that there was hurricane coming.

So they didn't know that the hurricane was coming. They actually had all of the cadets used tether a rope over the wings of these vehicles.

And the wings of these B-17s and eight, not eight times trainers.

And they had to hold the planes down during the storm. One of the planes flipped over. I don't know if it killed the guys, but there were some killed.

I couldn't find actual newspaper representation of who was killed, but because they censored the on-base stuff.

But I did get the stuff from the town of Galveston. That's where the storm came through.

They called it the surprise hurricane. And the reason I say the hurricane surprised me is I know I live in Fort Lauderdale.

And we've been through hurricane Andrew.

And that was sort of a surreal moment. I can't imagine being outside holding down planes.

And this chapter is in there because my father wrote so well about this particular hurricane.

But at the same time, he was going through that. John B. My uncle was flying Operation Title Wave, which was the first ever zero altitude mission.

And you eat zero altitude. What's that?

In the archives, the national archives from 1944 call it zero altitude of 50 between 50 feet to 150 feet above the ground.

It's unbelievable to fly a heavy bomber. It's hard to fly a small plane that low for a length of time.

But to fly a heavy bomber with loaded with bombs loaded with fuel.

And they actually were sitting ducks because the Germans were ready for them.

They lost some 500 guys that day went missing in action.

500 including my uncle went missing in action that day.

They regrouped and a couple of months later, they were able to have forces in Italy.

Operation Title Wave came out of North Africa. That was the closest they could get to Romania.

But then they regrouped, went to Italy. My father was part of the 15th Air Force.

And he flew his, he flew a couple of missions over Polestine. He was also shot down and missing in action.

Right. So I've got two guys from the same town missing in action. How uncanny you are.

I wish you could see my notes because I, I put in here the way you're talking about the zero altitude 50 to 150 feet above.

And, and I go talk about a lost piece of history because a flight like this doesn't just happen.

Loss forever are the entire groups of people that were required to make this happen.

And, and, and to go into Italy is up. Okay. I want to know about that whole entire process of people.

So, what do you mean, all the entire, I mean, I think not just a tube, but I mean, you, there were so many people involved.

Got it. Got it. So from England, they had three groups that were very experienced.

Wow. Three bomb groups and they flew them to the ninth Air Force back down in Benghazi.

So they had five groups of men. Groups consist of about 30 or 32 planes.

But actually, so 178 planes took off, but for whatever reason, only 150 made it over the target over Plowestee.

The target in Operation Title Wave. So out of 150 planes, 54 didn't make it back.

So, 54 were shot down. They went up there. The Germans were ready for them.

There was a long-term made. There were some navigation issues.

So they came in on the south side of the target, which was the most heavily defended, because Hitler defended his oil reserves second only to Berlin.

And they had fast firing cannons, 88s. They had bomb, they had bomb, or smoke pots so that you could, so it would obscure the oil fields.

It was like flying into the mouth of hell, and they were sitting ducks.

It was like a shooting gallery, because the men in the planes could see the guys shooting the guns at them.

They were that close. They were 50 feet apart, or 100 feet apart. So it was terrible.

So then they came back to North Africa. Those that were with the eighth Air Force went back to England.

The ninth Air Force stayed there. The 15th Air Force was able to set up places in Italy back in November, 43.

Operation reunion was August, 43. So by November, they started regrouping, and by April, they started missions over Plowestee.

And my father flew to, like I said, but when you're talking about bringing people from England, they were bringing thousands of ground crews, people to be here, people to serve them, thousands of people.

Just the organization of it was crazy. My uncle wrote in his letter, and this is back in 1944 days, he goes, I think this, he actually was the navigator for the commander of logistics.

He went around to Cairo and all this beforehand, and he wrote home and said, I think they spent $20 million on this, but no.

And then he said, no, I think the closer number is 50 million. Well, I don't know what 1944, $50 million means, but that's billions today.

And so it was a huge endeavor, Operation Reunion. And when it went to Italy, they had, I don't know how many bases they had for bombers. They probably had 30 bomber bases, 35 group bases.

The Allies, the English probably had some bases in there. So these are thousands of men. Actually in 1944, they kept a running total of 20,000 airmen.

Now that's just airmen in Italy at any one time. They had thousands of ground crew that supported those 20,000. In March of 1945, they were given the statistics of the men that went missing in 1944, and they had a hundred percent rate missing.

They had to keep a refilling. They lost 20,000 men in 1944, and they had to keep refilling them to keep that 20,000 number up.

Wow.

Yeah.

You've got, and you still have air in your lungs. I don't know how, I don't even know how you do that, but let me ask you this.

I haven't even begun to tell you all the little stories and journeys I've been on because this would take you three, three days for me to tell you that.

Which is every bit the reason why you either need to be doing something on Netflix or Hulu or you need to be hosting a podcast where you bring these men and women in.

And here's the one thing that I have learned over the past year, the number of men and women who are now going on to zoom connections, community connections that serve this nation.

That is how they're getting together. It's not necessarily with the VFW or the VA hospitals. They are joining each other. And I swear to God, that's where people are going to be hiring you to come in and talk to them.

Well, I hope so. I'll speak for free because I honestly want to get this story out of these two men because it's sort of a story of all servicemen.

I give servicemen such credit because they have to lead their families. They have to lead their lives behind to go overseas to protect us and to give us the freedom that we have today.

And I give them all the credit and it's probably from learning everything I learned about this book and putting it together because I didn't learn about World War II in history.

I didn't know anything about it. And so I started cold other than having a father that told me a whole bunch of stuff.

Oh, my God. Where can people go to find out more about you because 25 minutes with you is not enough.

Oh, you're a doll. You're a doll. So the navigator's letter. You can you can search that online and that it's on Amazon Barnes and Noble independent stories, all that.

Jan Crest Dondi, my name, my full name dot com. Tell us a little bit more about the story.

So you can go to that. But please tell your viewers to order today. It's out next week. And I really need the book really needs orders.

Free order. So please tell everybody to order this book and help me get John B and Bob's story out to the masses.

All right. Here's a thing that we're going to agree on. So every time that we celebrate our US military, you got to come on the show.

I don't care how many times we've talked about this book. You got to come back so we can talk about it and celebrate them for Veterans Day July 4th Memorial Day.

Any day that we are celebrating the men and women of this nation. I need to be talking with you.

Absolutely. I'll give you my email, my phone number separately. And I'm happy to speak with you anytime.

Anytime. Will you be brilliant today? Okay. Oh, thank you to thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on this show.

And God bless you.

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