Midnight Flyboys: The American Bomber Crews and Allied Secret Agents Who Aided the French Resistance in World War II

The untold history of a top-secret operation in the run-up to D-Day in which American flyers and Allied spies carried out some of the most daring cloak-and-dagger operations of World War II. In 1943, the OSS-precursor to the CIA-came up with a plan to increase its support to the French resistance forces that were fighting the Nazis.To start, the OSS recruited some of the best American bomber pilots and crews to a secret airfield twenty miles west of London and briefed them on the intended mission.Given a choice to stay or leave, every airman volunteered for what became known as Operation Carpetbagger. Their dangerous plan called for a new kind of flying: taking their B-24 Liberator bombers in the middle of the night across the English Channel and down to extremely low altitudes in Nazi-occupied France to find drop zones in dark fields.On the ground, resistance members waited to receive steel containers filled with everything from rifles and hand grenades to medicine and bicycle tires.S