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Bill Ibelle
AUTHOR

Bill Ibelle

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As a journalist and author of Into the Inferno, I operate on three principles: be curious, be kind, and don’t rest until you understand. Throughout my career, I have used my reporter’s notebook as a ticket into worlds I would otherwise have no access to, whether it’s interviewing a double murderer in the state prison, learning what led a homeless family to be camped in an abandoned railcar during a blizzard, or following a Navaho artist through a sacred canyon that was off limits to the general public. On one occasion several years ago, I used that notebook as a ticket to board a B-17 bomber and fly from Hyannis to New Bedford in my father’s waist gunner position. That flight prompted an interview with my father about his war experiences, which I used for my Sunday column and, several years later, expanded into this book. My mid-summer flight over Vineyard Sound was a moving experience, but it was nothing like my father’s, which took place in the dead of winter at 25,000 feet and 40 below zero. As I cruised over Buzzards Bay, there were no German fighters screaming out of the clouds with machine guns blasting, nor were their hundreds of flak cannons on the ground trying to blow me out of the sky. It is impossible to completely put yourself into another person’s shoes, but my goal in writing Into the Inferno has been to make the air war over Nazi Europe come alive for you, with all its terror, boredom, and humor. On a more personal level, my goal has been to try to understand my father—a man like many others of his time who remained distant to those they loved most due, in part, to their reluctance to talk about the trauma of participating in one of the pivotal moments of human history. I’m supposed to say a few words about myself here. Well, my life has been not nearly as dramatic as the years I recount in this book. I have compensated for this lack of drama by seeking out the hidden corners of my world. Although most of this was through journalism, I also chopped tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley, worked in a prestigious psychiatric hospital, battled storms at sea and did my best to inspire a love of literature among a roomful of horny high school students. I’ll leave it to you to determine which of those was the most dangerous task. At present, I’m working on two books. The first is a literary mystery set along the waterfront of a struggling fishing port and the second is a work of historical fiction about a shipwrecked peasant who was rescued by an American whaling ship and went on to play a key role in the opening of Japan in the mid 1800s. My hope is that those manuscripts will soon become books that I can post here for you to enjoy.
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