The Ruining Heaven takes the reader on a wrenching first-person trip through the savage air war over WW2 Germany, showing what combat does the minds and souls of the men and women who experience it.
It's dangerous work dropping bombs on strangers from the nose of a B-17. At 25,000 feet the temperature is 40 below zero. German planes attack from above while cannons fire from below. Sometimes four planes in ten make it back. The law of averages will kill all of them, sooner or later.
Knowing these odds, the OSS is training selected airmen in guerrilla warfare to keep fighting after they're shot down, an elite group that includes both Hawser and Colley. The program is so secret that Hawser can tell nobody about it. Not his best friend and commander, Captain Meyer. Certainly not Betty, the swashbuckling British ATA pilot with whom Hawser is falling in love. She has enough to worry about flying damaged aircraft across England, an occupation almost as dangerous as combat.