Introduction

12/7/1941 Pearl Harbor attached by the Japanese and the United States enters the War.
7/21/1942 21 yr old, Mr. Bob Lyle of Knoxville, Tennessee enlists in the Enlisted Reserve Corp of the U.S. Army. He has completed 1 year of college, lives with his parents, and states his occupation is an Actor.
4/12/1943 Private Bob Lyle reports for duty, U.S. Army, 6th Regiment, Ft. McClellan, Alabama, and starts a diary. For the next months, he will be sent to training grounds in Mississippi, Wisconsin, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and New Hampshire.
1/6/1944 2nd Lt. Bob Lyle and the rest of the crew take off from Grenier Field, New Hampshire for England.


Bob Lyle and Leota Goforth grew up together in the same neighborhood, playing neighborhood games, going to the same schools and the same church. When war came, Bob enlisted, as all of the boys did then. He went into the Army Air Corps and trained to be a Navigator for a B-17, Flying Fortress, Bomber. They married in 1942 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, just before his unit was sent to war.


They were 21 and 22 years old.


Bob started keeping a small diary after he joined the Army. That diary, along with their saved collection of letters and memoirs written by other flyers in his unit, offer a personalized view of those terrifying times.


During his first ever flight over the seas, on his way to England and War, Bob wrote the following in his diary:

In the middle of the wide, freezing North Atlantic,
Two miles above the icy waves,
The cloud-patched sky stretched endless above,
The billowy sea, endless below.
And the sky and the sea faded into each other along all four edges.


'Til all was one.


Overwhelming,




Magnificent,




Terrifying.




Submitted 1/16/11 to Indinkmag.com for publication in the Spring online issue.