Book Title: They Called Him Marvin, A History of Love, War and Family by Roger Stark
Category: Adult Fiction (18+), 333 pages
Genre: Historical Romance, WW2 history, True Love Story
Publisher: Silver Star Publishing
Release Date: September 2021
Content Rating: PG-13: No sex scenes, six mild profanities, depictions of war scenes.
They were just kids, barely not teenagers, madly in love, desperate to be a family, but a war and a B29 got in there way.
Three
hundred ten days before Pearl Harbor, buck private Dean Sherman
innocently went to church with a new friend in Salt Lake City. From that
moment, the unsuspecting soldier travelled a remarkable, heroic path,
falling in love, graduating from demanding training to become a B29
pilot, conceiving a son and entering the China, Burma and India theater
of the WW2.
He chronicled his story with letters home to his
bride Connie that he met on that fateful Sunday, blind to the fact that
fifteen hundred seventy five days after their meeting, a Japanese
swordsman would end his life.
His crew, a gaggle of Corporals
that dubbed themselves the Corporalies, four officers and a tech
Sargent, adventured their way across the globe. Flying the “Aluminum
Trail” also called the Hump through the Himalayas, site of the most
dangerous flying in the world. Landing in China to refuel and then fly
on to to places like Manchuria, Rangoon or even the most southern parts
of Japan to drop 500 pounders.
Each mission had it’s challenges,
minus fifty degree weather in Mukden, or Japanese fighters firing away
at them, a close encounter of the wrong kind, nearly missing a collision
with another B29 while flying in clouds, seeing friends downed and lost
because of “mechanicals,” the constant threat of running out of fuel
and their greatest fear, engine fire.
Transferred to the Mariana
Islands, he and his crew were shot down over Nagoya, Japan as part of
Mission 174, captured and declared war criminals.
Connie’s
letters reveal life for a brand new mother whose husband is declared
MIA. The agony for both of them, he in a Japanese prison, declared a war
criminal, and she just not knowing why his letters stopped coming.
I
am, by my own admission, a reluctant writer. But there are stories that
demand to to be told. When we hear them, we must pick up our pen, lest
we forget and the stories be lost. Six years ago, in a quiet
conversation with my friend Marvin, I learned the tragic story of his
father, a WW2 B-29 Airplane Commander, shot down over Nagoya, Japan just
months before the end of the war. The telling of the story that evening
by this half orphan was so moving and full of emotion, it compelled me
to ask if I could write the story. The result being They Called Him Marvin.
My
life has been profoundly touched in so many ways by being part of
documenting this sacred story. I pray that we never forget, as a people,
the depth of sacrifice that was made by ordinary people like Marvin and
his father and mother on our behalf.
connect with the author: website ~ facebook ~ instagram ~ goodread
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Enter the Giveaway:
THEY CALLED HIM MARVIN Book Tour Giveaway
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