Growing up in a family of storytellers, Janis Thomas Cramer spent Sunday dinners with the Thomas clan in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where she heard family lore begging to be retold--stories of the Depression, of six sons fighting in World War II, and of a tornado's destroying three family homes. She lived fantastic stories of her own as well, with two brothers and an army of cousins and friends from Riverside School. In the early Sixties, she endured teenage angst with other Baby Boomers crowding into Alice Robertson Junior High School during the New Math, the Race for Space, and the President's...

Oscar J. H. Thomas joined the 45th Division of the National Guard in 1939 in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to make some extra money for his family. Little did he know that this commitment would take him across an ocean into World War II, where he would fight battles in Sicily and France, sustain a head injury, become captured by Germans and imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp, Oflag 64. After making a courageous escape, he wandered across Poland looking for his fellow soldiers. This is the story of Thomas, his brothers, and the other fighting men of the 180th Infantry Regiment, the Thunderbirds.