Lou W. Souders is the daughter of Lieutenant James Neal Workman, a B-24 Liberator pilot who flew his full combat tour with the 453rd Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force from 1943 to 1945. She grew up in a house where her father’s war was rarely spoken of directly but was always present in the quieter things — in the way he prayed at supper, in the notebooks of poetry he kept, in the way he still looked at her mother after fifty years of marriage.

After her father’s passing, Lou found the diary he had kept during the war. The pages her mother had never seen. She read what he had written at 25,000 feet, in a small navy leather book from 1941, in the freezing hours between missions. She realized this was too precious to sit in a drawer.

For years, she preserved her father’s letters, photographs, and personal papers — a family archive that became the foundation for Diary of a Bomber Pilot. What began as a personal act of remembrance grew into something larger: a testament to faith, love, and the quiet courage of a generation.

Lou lives in South Carolina, where she shares her father’s story with schools, veterans’ groups, historical societies, book clubs, and readers who understand that some stories must be kept — and told — before they are lost.