More praise for Goodbye, Liberty Belle:

Goodbye, Liberty Belle is different from any other war story I have read. That is because it is really three stories. One of these is the story of Jim Merritt, Senior, a B-24 pilot in the Second World War flying out of Italy with the Fifteenth Air Force, and of his last combat flight. It’s a good war-story: how his plane, the Liberty Belle, was hit by antiaircraft fire over Vienna, how Merritt got it back over Partisan-controlled Yugoslavia before the crew bailed out, and how the Partisans got them out, in spite of rain and cold and fascist patrols. And it’s a story from a theater of war that has never gotten its share of attention (because the Eighth Air Force, flying from England, got it all).
     A second story is about that pilot’s son, Jim Junior, who decided that he wanted to know the story of that last flight — the whole story — and who wrote letters, made phone calls, and traveled across the United States to interview survivors, get the facts, and put them together. His hunt for the story has a particular pull for a writer like myself, and I’m impressed by the author’s industry and skill; but I think his account will interest anyone who has ever wanted to know what happened back then, when fathers and grandfathers were young, and has wondered how to go about finding out.
     The third story — and it’s as engaging as the others — tells how the two Jims, father and son, returned to Yugoslavia in 1986 to revisit the scene of the Liberty Belle’s crash, and to meet the people who had helped the crew to escape and to reach the Adriatic and safety.
     Merritt weaves these three stories together, cutting and shifting as skillfully as a novelist, setting past against present, event against memory, using both official documents and recollections to fill out his telling. In the process he creates a lively cast of characters — crew members, both as they were in 1944 and in their older versions of the 1980s, and Yugoslavians — village elders, widows, mayors, Partisans, all done in sharp detail.
     These are three stories, but they interweave into one — the story of how a son set out to discover his father by re-creating a crucial event of his father’s young manhood. The two characters in this story — the eager son and the reserved, self-controlled father — are made vividly and movingly real as they struggle with language difficulties, weather, and too many toasts of rakija, the local brandy, until at last Jim Senior unbends, and drinks a toast to “the only country to tell both Hitler and Stalin to go to hell.” It’s a great moment.
— From the foreword by Samuel Hynes, author of Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator; Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Princeton University

[Goodbye Liberty Belle] involves a network of themes that usually occur in a novel: the nurture of old memories, the grasp of long-forgotten friendships, the dawning of understanding between father and son. ... This grandly complex tale is handled expertly by Merritt the younger. Goodbye, Liberty Belle is a war story, sort of, but has enough facets to gleam brightly whichever way you look at it.
— Edward Parks (writing in Smithsonian magazine); author of Nanette: Her Pilot’s Love Story and Angels Twenty: A Young American Flier a Long Way from Home ///

... a moving account of the human side of World War II and a welcome reminder of the multitude of heroes and the many forms of heroism.
— George P. Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State; author of Turmoil and Triumph