The pilots and crews of the B-24s came from every state and territory in America. They were young, fit, eager. They were sons of workers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, businessmen, educators. A few were married, most were not. Some had an excellent education, including college, where they majored in history, literature, physics, engineering, chemistry, and more. Others were barely, if at all, out of high school.

They were all volunteers. The U.S. Army Air Corps -- after 1942 the Army Air Forces -- did not force anyone to fly. They made the choice. Most of them were between the ages of two and ten in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island to Paris. For many boys, this was the first outside-the-family event to influence them. It fired their imagination. Like Lindbergh, they too wanted to fly.

In their teenage years, they drove Model T Fords, or perhaps Model A's -- if they drove at all. Many of them were farm boys. They plowed behind mules or horses. They relieved themselves in outdoor privies. They walked to school, one, two, or sometimes more miles. Most of them, including the city kids, were poor. If they were lucky enough to have jobs they earned a dollar a day, sometimes less. If they were younger sons, they wore hand-me-down clothes. In the summertime, many of them went barefoot. They seldom traveled. Many had never been out of their home counties. Even most of the more fortunate had never been out of their home states or regions. Of those who were best off, only a handful had ever been out of the country. Almost none of them had ever been up in an airplane. A surprising number had never even seen a plane. But they all wanted to fly.

There were inducements beyond the adventure of the thing. Glamour. Extra pay. The right to wear wings. Quick promotions. You got to pick your service -- no sleeping in a Navy bunk in a heaving ship or in a foxhole with someone shooting at you. They knew they would have to serve, indeed most of them wanted to serve. Their patriotism was beyond question. They wanted to be a part of smashing Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, and their thugs. But they wanted to choose how they did it. Overwhelmingly they wanted to fly.

They wanted to get off the ground, be like a bird, see the country from up high, travel faster than anyone could do while attached to the earth. More than electric lights, more than steam engines, more than telephones, more than automobiles, more even than the printing press, the airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from the earth and opened the skies.

They were astonishingly young. Many joined the Army Air Forces as teens. Some never got to be twenty years old before the war ended. Anyone over twenty-five was considered to be, and was called, an "old man." In the twenty-first century, adults would hardly give such youngsters the key to the family car, but in the first half of the 1940s the adults sent them out to play a critical role in saving the world.

Most wanted to be fighter pilots, but only a relatively few attained that goal. Many became pilots or co-pilots on two-or four-engine bombers. The majority became crew members, serving as gunners or radiomen or bombardiers or flight engineers or navigators. Never mind. They wanted to fly and they did.

This is mainly the story of one airplane and the men who flew it. It draws on other experiences of other men and other planes in the U.S. Army Air Forces, but basically it is about a B-24 bomber named the Dakota Queen, its crew and squadron pilot George McGovern, and the 741st of the 455th Bomb Group. They were neither typical -- how could they be in an air force that numbered thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of crew members? -- nor unique.

On July 19, 1922, in the Wesleyan Methodist parsonage in Avon, South Dakota, George Stanley McGovern was born. He had an older sister, Olive, and later a younger sister, Mildred, and then a younger brother, Larry. George's grandfather, born in Ireland, had served in the Civil War on the Union side and then was a coal miner. George's father, Joseph, born in 1868, had been a professional baseball player in the St. Louis Cardinals' organization but because of his Methodist religion he was disturbed by the amount of drinking and gambling and wild women associated with his team. He gave it up when he heard a "call to preach" and went to a Methodist seminary in Houghton, New York. Upon graduation he volunteered to go out to the Dakotas. There he used his handyman skills to build churches -- some of which still stand -- where he preached. His first wife died, leaving him childless. When he was fifty years old he married Frances McLean, a twenty-eight-year-old who was a soloist in his church and had a beautiful voice.

In 1927, when George was five years old, the family was living in Canada. When Lindbergh made his flight, as he recalled it, "the news just saturated all the conversation, newspapers, the radios. I remember that flight as though it was yesterday. Pictures of Lindbergh with his helmet and goggles were on the front pages. I just thought he was the most glamorous creature on God's earth. I grew up thinking Lindbergh was our greatest American."

In 1928 the McGoverns moved to Mitchell, in eastern South Dakota, a town of some 12,000 residents, where Joseph continued in the ministry. In all his life, George never heard his mother call his father by his first name (he did hear her say "dear," once at least). There were few displays of affection, even though they were devoted to each other and their children. There was no extra money and precious little of it at that -- Joseph never got as much as $100 a month in salary from the church. He did get a sack of potatoes from a farmer in his congregation, or a bushel of apples, or a crate of eggs, or some beef or pork. He supplemented his income by buying old houses, fixing them up, and then selling them, and he managed to buy a home in Mitchell on the corner of Fifth and Sanborn, where George grew up.

George was a "preacher's kid," but unlike some others in that category he had no wild streak. He was an average student whose one fling was going to the movies, which were forbidden to good Wesleyan Methodists, but he went anyway. He went pheasant hunting too, as most South Dakota boys did. It was his father's passion and his father taught him how to shoot a shotgun, a 16-gauge single-barrel. While hunting he saw dust storms turn the sky black. He saw hordes of grasshoppers eating the crops and even chewing their way through hoe handles. In town he saw banks and stores close their doors in bankruptcy. Once, while hunting with his father, he saw a farmer named Art Kendall sitting on the steps of his back porch, tears streaming down his face. Kendall explained to McGovern's father that he had just received a check from the stockyards for that year's production of pigs. The check did not cover the cost of trucking the pigs to market. By the time McGovern entered high school, nearly one farmer in five had lost his land to foreclosure.

In high school, Joe Quintal was the athletic director of four elementary schools, the junior and senior high schools, and coached the school's football, basketball, and track teams. He also taught the gymnastic classes at the elementary schools. An excellent athlete, he had been the quarterback for the University of South Dakota. McGovern describes him as a "very articulate, intelligent man. I both admired him and feared him."

One of the exercises Quintal had his seventh-grade gym classes do was to dive headfirst over a leather sawhorse and do a somersault. "You had to run at full speed," McGovern remembered, "dive over, tuck your head, hit the mat and roll." McGovern couldn't bring himself to do it. He would run up to the sawhorse "and I knew I'd break my neck if I went over the top." So when he got to the sawhorse he balked. Not once, not twice, but a number of times.

Quintal blew his whistle. "Mac, come here," he shouted. "What's the matter with you?"

"Well, Mr. Quintal, I just can't do that."

"What do you mean, you can't do it? Have you seen these other boys going over that horse? You've got a pair of legs, a pair of arms, don't you have the same equipment they do?" McGovern said again that he just couldn't do it.

"You want me to tell you why?" McGovern said he would like to know. "Well," Quintal said, "you're a physical coward -- that's why."

The entire class, some sixty or so students, was watching. "I was just mortified to tears," McGovern recalled. But he still couldn't do it. Quintal "really made me feel that I was a coward. That haunted me." When he entered high school, he was determined to do something in athletics. A fast runner, he joined the track team, where he set no records but did make a respectable showing. Still he would get flashbacks to the sawhorse incident.

In 1940, after graduation, McGovern entered Dakota Wesleyan College (enrollment: 500), just down the street from his family home. The war was on in Europe and China. To get prepared, the U.S. government had inaugurated a program called Civilian Pilot Training. The idea was to augment the nation's reserve of pilots with at least some introductory training of new civilian students. There was an opportunity to start a CPT program at Mitchell Field, just outside town. McGovern's fellow student and friend, Norman Ray from Custer, South Dakota, was desperate to fly. They were in the same freshman class. Ray was so poor that when he showed up at Wesleyan he had an old pair of ratty tennis shoes, blue jeans, and a couple of T-shirts. One day McGovern told him he ought to ask a girl for a date. Ray replied, "George, I can't afford to date."

"Well, if you go down to the College Inn all you need is ten cents," McGovern pointed out.

"Well, I haven't got ten cents."

He certainly had the desire to fly. The requirement was to have ten students enrolled before the course -- which included ground school instruction as well as flight training and carried college credit -- could begin. The CPT would supply the airplane and pay the instructor. So Ray went around talking to all his friends. He persuaded nine of his fellow students, including one woman and the eighteen-year-old McGovern, to sign up.

McGovern had never before been up in a plane but he agreed to be one of the students because he felt, "If I can fly an airplane that will show Joe Quintal that it isn't heights that I'm worried about, that I'm not too cowardly to fly a plane." He had to pass a physical, discovering in the process that he had good depth perception -- and he found out later from other physicals that he would score almost off the charts on depth perception.

The plane was a single-engine Aeronca, built in Middletown, Ohio, with a front and rear cockpit. The instructor, Cliff Ferguson, a big, bulky, heavyset man, sat in front. There were two sets of controls, and they were connected so Ferguson could overwhelm the student and take control if he needed to. On McGovern's first flight, when Ferguson opened the throttle for takeoff, "I was scared to death -- terrified." He thought, What the hell have I gotten myself into? I just can't do this. It was a typical South Dakota day, with lots of wind. The wings were fluttering and the plane was bouncing. Ferguson nevertheless told McGovern that he was in control. Toward the end of the lesson, he told McGovern, "You're doing okay."

McGovern continued the course, though "I was even more terrified in subsequent lessons when he demonstrated spins and stalls." Still, "Big Cliff would give me a little signal that I was doing okay, and nothing made me happier." After eight hours of instruction, Ferguson told McGovern that he had good coordination and was making good landings. Taking off and landing were two of the hardest things for a student to learn, but McGovern knew how far the plane was off the ground, when to level off, how to land the plane on its two front wheels, then gradually set the tail down onto the rear wheel. So Ferguson told him, "You're ready to solo." It went well. McGovern circled over Mitchell, gazing down at the water tower, the Corn Palace, and the Wesleyan campus, then over Lake Mitchell. When he landed he had a sense of exhilaration and a determination that if America entered the war and his time to serve came, it would be in the Army Air Corps.

In the fall of 1941 McGovern, then a sophomore with his flying classes completed, saw B-24 bombers for the first time. He watched them going overhead -- they were based in Omaha, Nebraska -- on practice missions. The pilots used the Mitchell Airport runway as an auxiliary landing field. He saw no fighter airplanes, nor any B-17s. Occasionally McGovern would see one or two B-24s land. They were big and cumbersome but impressive. He never got aboard one. He never thought, Someday I'm going to fly one of those birds. But he noticed and did think, Those pilots are really something.

The B-24s and the pilots that McGovern saw were brand-new. The United States in 1940 and 1941 had only minuscule armed forces. The Navy was the best off, but its fleet was badly outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese, not to mention the British. The U.S. Army at the beginning of World War II had fewer than 200,000 men (26,000 of them in the Army Air Corps), which meant it ranked sixteenth in the world, right behind Romania. The Army was pitifully smaller than the millions of men in the Japanese, German, and Italian armies. By June 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps had been built up to 1,257 combat planes, nearly all of them inferior to the Japanese Zero, which outnumbered them anyway, and to the German Luftwaffe's fighter fleet, which was four times larger than the American fleet and growing rapidly.

When the war began in Europe in September 1939, the Depression continued to grip America. The unemployment rate was 25 percent. Those with jobs were earning only a little more than $100 a month. There was no unemployment insurance, no welfare paid for by the government, no antibiotics. Most diseases were life-threatening. Transportation was by automobile, bus, or train, slow and crude. Nearly all roads were two lanes. Few people traveled. What money they had went to feeding, clothing, and housing themselves.

In technology, America was far behind the Germans and Japanese, especially in airplanes. Commercial air travel was for a privileged few wealthy people and not reliable at that. The new twin-engine Douglas DC-3 was the most advanced plane. It carried twenty-one passengers. It took twenty-four hours to fly from New York City to Los Angeles, but only when weather permitted, and even then the DC-3 had to make three refueling stops along the way. It could make 155 miles per hour and had a range of 900 miles, at best. The passenger cabin was not pressurized. There was no oxygen available for passengers. It cruised at 10,000 feet, with a maximum of 15,000, which meant it flew in the clouds much of the time. There was no radar and what little electronic navigation aids were available were poor. They consisted of low-frequency radio beams that the pilots could follow, but they were almost useless in bad weather, as the radio signals were jammed by static from radio waves emitted by thunderstorms. There were light beacons on the waves that the pilots could use as navigation aids, but they too were useless in bad weather.

By late 1941, there were only a few civilian pilots or crew members. Of those who later served in the Fifteenth Air Force, an estimated 85 percent had no prior military experience, nor had they everbeen in an airplane. McGovern was lucky, but he had been off the ground only eight times and that had been in a single-engine plane with no armament. Those who served in the Fifteenth Air Force came from all forty-eight states and the territories of Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico, and had different backgrounds and experiences.

Ralph C. "Bill" Rounds was born in 1924 in Wichita, Kansas. His father owned a lumber business and was a wealthy man. Rounds was handsome and enthusiastic, especially for girls and airplanes. He was a wisecracking prankster, the image of a devil-may-care flyboy. His desire was to be a fighter pilot. His life experiences, his attitude, and his personality were completely different from McGovern's.

Kenneth Higgins was born in 1925 in Dallas, Texas. In 1941 he was a junior at Highland Park High School. He would give anything to learn to fly.

Robert Hammer, born in 1923, one of five children, was a North Dakota boy. His father was a trapper and hunter. In the harsh wintertime, Hammer recalled seeing muskrat pelts hanging to dry from wires stretched from wall to wall in nearly every room in his family house. Death was ever present. As a seven-year-old, he saw his two-year-old sister die of pneumonia. When he was in fifth grade, his mother died in childbirth, as did the baby. Another sister died in 1938, of strep throat.

Hammer made what money he could, when he could. In the summer, he would walk seven miles to the local nine-hole golf course. School was a mile away; he would walk in the morning, return home for lunch, walk back to school, then home, so the seven miles wasn't much. He would caddy, at 25 cents per round. In high school, he got a job at the Dakota Hide and Fur firm, packing wool, stretching jackrabbit hides, loading rabbit meat for shipment to mink farms. He was paid 25 cents per hour, which was somewhat better than he got working in the harvest fields from sunup to sundown, hauling bundles, field pitching, and shocking, at $1.50 per day. When he was fifteen years old he had lied about his age to get into the Citizens Military Training Camp, which he attended for three summers, learning how to march and a bit about being an infantryman.

Hammer had never been out of North Dakota, but by the time of his high school graduation, in 1940, he was eager to see the world and wanted to join the Navy to do so. But he was only seventeen and his father refused to sign the papers. How about the Coast Guard? No. The Army? No. "So I finally decided I would have to be content with seeing North Dakota."

Roland Pepin was born on July 4, 1924, and was three years old when Lindbergh made his flight. Pepin's father bought him a pedal-type airplane toy "and a little Lindy flying suit complete with leather helmet and goggles." From then on, he built and drew airplanes. He was determined to join the Army Air Corps as soon as he was old enough.

William V. Barnes and his twin brother, Robert N. Barnes, were seventeen years old in 1941, attending a small military school in Texas. Naturally they were in the ROTC, where they learned the rudiments of being soldiers.

Walter Shostack, born in 1919 in Constantinople, was the son of a pilot in the czar's air force in World War I. Both his grandfathers had been generals in the czar's army. His father was shot down on the Turkish front. He survived and, to escape the revolution, went to Turkey. In 1923, together with his family, he emigrated to the United States. Walter grew up in New York City. At first he and his parents spoke no English. They fed themselves and found shelter by selling his grandmother's jewelry. His father went to work making airplanes. When he was old enough, so did Walter, who moved to Detroit for his job. There he met a Hungarian girl, whose father, Stephen Balogh, had emigrated to America shortly after World War I began to avoid conscription in the Hungarian army. He married and in 1920 had a daughter, whom he named Aranka Gizela, Hungarian for Gold Grace. Walter met her on a blind date arranged by his friend, Stephen Balogh, Jr. Both young men graduated from the Manhattan School of Aviation Trade and got jobs at Wright Field, in Dayton, Ohio. Before entering the service, Shostack married Gold Grace.

Eugene Hudson was born in 1922 in Los Angeles. His father was a Lutheran minister in Beverly Hills, right on the edge of Hollywood. Hudson graduated from Fairfax High School in 1940 and entered Los Angeles City College. His brother had joined the Air Corps in 1938, which fired his imagination after listening to his brother's stories. Hudson worked the midnight shift at Douglas Aircraft while going to college. He was a riveter working on the XB-19, an experimental bomber. Speaking for himself as well as his friends, Hudson remarked, "We all had a flair for adventure."