70th Anniversary of attack on Pearl Harbor

In a few hours, it will be exactly 70 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This is a significant date in American and world history, and well worth my noting for important reasons.  Just looking at the reality of 70 years makes a person realize that there are now dramatically fewer living survivors of that day, December 7^th, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States consequently went to war. For example, the Pearl Harbor Survivors’ Association, founded in 1958, will be disbanded at the end of this month because there are so few survivors left.

The War in Europe started more than two years prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor

Of course, for those in Europe, the Second World War started in September 1939, and many Americans quietly or more actively supported the allied effort.

For well over a year, I have been actively researching that interval of September 1939 to December 1941. The reason? Why else does an author do research? For a book, of course. Perhaps even a series of books.

Courage in Combat:Volume 1 – The Flying Fighters

This new fiction book, very much a departure from my previous efforts and current-day genre, will introduce some characters that I will follow from 1938 to 1941. In possible further books in the series, I hope and intend to follow the characters from 1941 right through to the end of the war in 1945, and perhaps beyond. The book(s), while fiction, will be based on historical fact, and I hope to introduce readers to some lesser known facts, situations, and locations that formed part of the overall fighting in WWII.  The book is intended for a Young Adult audience, and is initially about teenagers who signed up to be Air Force pilots.

Some of the characters will accurately portray Americans who traveled to Canada and to England, to join up with the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air Force in order to get into the war and fight. After the US went to war in December 1941, many of them returned home to join the US Army Air Corps, but many stayed with the RCAF and RAF until 1945.

I hope I will be able to bring that dramatic period of history to life for my readers.

An excerpt of the book can be found on this website.  At this time, I do not have a planned release date for the first book in the series, Courage in Combat: Volume 1 – The Flying Fighters, but given the significance of today’s date, I wanted to write about the book, post the short excerpt, and comment about the 70^th Anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Wil