Author(s): Adam Makos

Military

"Devotion is the gripping story of the US Navy's most famous aviator duo - Tom Hudner, a white, blue-blooded New Englander, and Jesse Brown, a black sharecropper's son from Mississippi. Against all odds, Jesse beat back racism to become the Navy's first black aviator. Against all expectations, Tom passed up a free ride at Harvard to fly fighter planes for his country. Barely a year after President Truman ordered the desegregation of the military, the two became wingmen in Fighter Squadron 32 and went on to fight side-by-side in the Korean War. In the war's climatic battle at the Chosin Reservoir, Tom and Jesse flew headlong into waves of troops in order to defend an entire division of Marines trapped on a frozen lake. Jesse was shot down and pinned in the burning wreckage of his fighter. Tom then faced an unthinkable choice - to see his friend burn to death or to go down in a blaze of glory, flouting the rules to crash-land behind enemy lines and save Jesse - or die trying. The question was crueller than the freezing wind: How far will you go to save a brother?"