Lost Over Luzon: John Wesley Evatt, Bombing Squadron Nineteen and the Wife Who Waited - Paperback

They had been married only nineteen days when John Evatt boarded a train with Bombing Squadron Nineteen and left for the Pacific.

John was a Texas farm boy turned naval aviator, flying the difficult SB2C Helldiver from aboard the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. Jeanne remained with her parents in Long Beach, where their new marriage continued through letters crossing thousands of miles of ocean.

The letters carried what ordinary married life they could preserve. John wrote about loneliness, censored mail, the danger he could only hint at, and the homecoming he believed lay ahead. Jeanne answered every silence, sometimes sending a dozen letters between mail calls.

John flew with Bombing Squadron Nineteen through the Pacific campaigns of 1944. Then, following an attack on an airfield near Manila, he was reported missing. The Navy could offer Jeanne no certainty, only fragments of information and the possibility that he might still be alive.

Drawn from John and Jeanne's surviving correspondence, the diaries and memoirs of the men who flew beside him, and official Navy records, Lost Over Luzon is the true story of one young pilot, one squadron, and a marriage lived almost entirely by mail across an ocean.