Maximum Effort

8th Air Force #5

by Cheryl Pula

Lieutenant Jesse Nowakowski, U.S. Army Air Force bombardier, rescues a little girl trapped in the bombed out rubble of her home in London, England, in January 1944, but not without consequences when he injures his knee and has to endure a dress-down from his commanding officer, Major Jack Harrington, for endangering himself to perform the rescue in the middle of an air raid. During the course of the next several months, another member of the 91st receives a Dear John letter from his girlfriend back home around the same time that Jack marries Captain Marcia Meyers, a nurse he met when he first came to England. The D-Day invasion of Normandy occurs on June 6, 1944, and only one day later, while flying a mission to bomb artillery installations south of Caen, Captain Matt Moore and his crew are the victims of flak, and the plane goes down. Matt finds himself on the ground in German occupied France, along with a badly wounded crewman. It is now a matter of survival to see if they can escape the Germans and reach the new Allied lines pushing out from the Normandy beachhead.

331 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1900

About the author

A native of New York Mills, New York, Cheryl Pula is a retired Reference Librarian. She is a Regents graduate of New York Mills Jr.-Sr. High School, with a concentrate in science and mathematics. Cheryl attended Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, New York, where she received an Associate Degree in Liberal Arts, then went to SUNY Oswego, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in the Russian Language with a minor in German. She was on the Dean’s List at both schools. After substitute teaching in the New York Mills Union Free School District for five years for both foreign language and special education classes, she went back to school and received a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she is a lifetime member of the University of Michigan Alumni Association. Her first library position was as the supervisor of the Lending Department at the Mid-York Library System in Utica, where she performed all the reference work for the system’s 43 member libraries. After almost ten years, she became the Head of the Adult Services Department at the Utica Public Library in Utica, then in 1987, the Reference Librarian at the Dunham Public Library in Whitesboro. Though officially retired in August 2011, she now works part-time at the New York Mills Public Library in New York Mills, NY.

In 1988, she was awarded the New York Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award. She served on the Board of Trustees of the New York Mills Public Library. Cheryl also teaches for the Mohawk Valley Institute for Learning in Retirement at SUNYIT in Marcy, New York, teaching a variety of historical subjects to retirees who are interested continuing their education. She has taught courses on unsolved historical mysteries; the American Civil War; World War II; The Titanic and several other topics.

Cheryl was a founding member of the New York Mills Historical Society, and served as its first president in the late 1970’s. She is currently the village historian of New York Mills and President of The History Club, which she founded in Whitesboro in 1995. She is the club’s newsletter editor. She is also the founder, current secretary and newsletter editor of the General Daniel Butterfield Civil War Round Table in Whitesboro. She is a member of the American Legion Auxiliary of the Arthur Moran Post #66 in Camden, New York, as well as an honorary member of the Memphis Belle Memorial Association of Memphis, Tennessee. She is known around the central New York area for presenting a number of historical lectures (89 to be exact!) on topics from the Titanic to the first moon landing in July 1969. Cheryl was elected “Historian of the Year” by the Oneida County Historian’s Association in 2006. In 2010, she was listed in Who’s Who In America.

She is an author, having written on Irish immigrants to the Utica area in a book entitled Ethnic Utica, published in 1994 by Utica College. With her brother, she is co-author and co-editor of a book on the Civil War regiments from Oneida County, which was published by the Eugene Nassar Ethnic Studies Department of Utica College in November 2010 entitled, With Courage and Honor: Oneida County’s Role in the Civil War. She is a contributing author, co-editor and served as proofreader for The Polish-American Encyclopedia, published by McFarlane Publishers in January 2011. For her work on the Encyclopedia, she has just been awarded the Polish-American Historical Society’s Distinguished Achievement Award. She is author of a novel, the first in a proposed series about Eighth Air Force bomber crews in World War II England, titled The Children’s Crusade, was published in October 2011 by Whitehall Publishing. At this point, six more have been published: The Ragged Irregulars (April 2012); The Rookie (July 2012); A Wing and a Prayer (January 2013); Maximum Effort (July 2013); The Dogs of War (January 2014) and Above and Beyond (July 2014). The eighth in the series, Some