Goodbye, Liberty Belle: A Son's Search for His Father's War

Goodbye, Liberty Belle is the intertwining of two stories—that of World War II bomber pilot Jim Merritt, and the story of his son J. I. Merritt, a man seeking to better understand his father and know what he endured during the war. In 1944, Jim Merritt's B-24 bomber Liberty Belle was shot down over Yugoslavia. The entire crew survived the parachute trip to the ground, but once there they discovered that their survival was far from assured. With the help of Yugoslav partisans, the crew made it to safety in Italy, after some harrowing scrapes. In 1986, J. I. Merritt journeyed with his father back to Yugoslavia, to meet the men who helped the crew survive and retrace the steps the men took in their escape to Allied territory. The story that Merritt tells combines his father's wartime memories with his own discoveries of his heritage.