“You lay in the tall grass with the wind blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats,” she wrote. “All around you, anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts.” Flaming planes arced toward the ground, “leaving as their last testament a long black smudge against the sky.” She heard engines and machine guns. “You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky,” she wrote. “You knew it, but even so it was
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