Climb into the cockpit of a B-24 Liberator. Feel your heart race as you sight your target and drop your bombs. Heading home, you are hit by dozens of enemy fighteres and flak from ground fire. The plane shudders as cannon shells strike, smashing the tail, ripping into the bomb bay and severing the cables and gas lines, spewing fuel in all direcitons. Another shell explodes under the pilot’s seat, rupturing the oxygen lines. Watch as your pilot and crew memebers lose oxygen and pass out, leaving you–a twenty-year-old co-pilot with untested skills–to mtake the controls, making split-second decisions that will mean the difference between life and death. And the fighters keep coming….Join Lt. Al Asch on his journey from his roots as a grandson of immigrant farmers in small-town America, to his early years of struggle in a single-parent family, helping his mother to eke out an existence during the Great Depression. From these humble beginnings, Al developed the tenacity, courage, and integrity that would take him from the farm to the battlefield in the air. Fascinated by airplanes, Al was a natural-born pilot, receiving additional training while still in high school. When WWII erupted, he was ready to fly.