Harold Nelson Rhodes

My dad, Harold Rhodes, died in 1971 at the age of forty-seven. He never talked much about the war that any of us can remember. What our family knew fit in a sentence or two: he was a top turret gunner on a B-24 named Naughty Norma, they were shot down on their twenty-ninth mission, and they came down in Sweden. That was about the extent of it.

Then on Christmas Day, 1999, my son gave me a model of that plane. Looking for information to build it, he had posted a question on a veterans’ message board and forgotten about it. A year and a half later he went back and found three replies waiting. Within the week I was on the telephone with the man who flew my father on every one of those missions.

What follows came out of those conversations, and out of everything our family has turned up since. It is our desire that you find something here worth your time, and that all of us have a greater appreciation for the men and women who have fought and are fighting to keep our country free. We owe them more than we could ever repay.