Long John Silverman

The Wellington Raids ended on the 18th of December 1939, the British force exhausted but having made a decisive, staving off impact on the German war-making capability.

In this last sortie across the channel in the Wilhelshaven Raids, Trevor Chelton’s Wellington bomber was shot down by a German ME-109E as it had the English channel in its sights after a successful run over Wilhelshaven, with the plane ditching in the North Sea.

Three weeks later, John Silverman was reassigned to Claire Chennault’s fledgling Flying Tiger “support” aid force unit that was forming in Kunming, China, to help bolster the Chiang Kai-shek government’s resistance to the Japanese invasion in the east. And it wasn’t long before John was fully occupied with an entirely different sort of war and without the time or luxury of private mourning for his lost lover. Young men were dying at every turning. There was no time to think on the senseless wasting of them individually any more.