Go With God

About the Book

Go with God is the story of a young prisoner of war who never lost his faith or his passion to break free. Norm Achen was born and raised in the 1920s on a farm in the Midwest. When he was six years old his family was wintering near Casa Grande, Arizona when the legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart made a forced landing in the desert near their home. His mother helped miss Earhart patch her damaged aircraft, and as the young lad watched her plane disappear over the horizon a passion was ignited - he knew that some day he was going to fly. At the onset of WWII, Norm Achen, like millions of other young men, answered Uncle Sam's call and enlisted in the Army Air Corps. While he was awaiting his call to active duty the Carpenter's Union got him a job on a project in the Arizona desert. Ironically, the project was building prison barracks for American citizens - the Japanese displaced from the west coast. He would dwell on this irony when he himself became a POW. After extensive training, Norm earned his wings as a fighter pilot and was assigned to the famous 4th fighter group, previously known as "The Eagle Squadron", based in England. After flying combat missions for two months he was shot down over Germany and, barely surviving the crash landing of his P-51, he was taken prisoner, and initially tried and acquitted of war crimes. The real story of Go with God begins here. After eight months of unspeakable horror, starvation, long bitter cold marches from Stalag to Stalag, watching his fellow prisoners die along the way, Norm and another POW escaped and for fifteen terrifying days managed to evade capture until they literally stumbled out of the woods and into elements of Patton's onrushing Third Army. It is a story of courage, tenacity and faith in God. As an epilogue, Norm tells of working for the Marx Brothers after the war and how they helped him start a new life.

About the Author

Norm Achen - Born 1921 - Brought up on a Wisconsin farm during the depression, graduated from Elgin Academy, Elgin, Ill. and attended university at University of Arizona, UCLA, Western State Law and performed graduate work at Trinity College in Cambridge, England. BSL and JD degrees, president of Hyland Labs, International Medical Labs, Don Baxter and Baxter Labs, founder and chairman Overland Bank and president of Nichols Institute Clinical Labs, consultant to the College of Pathologists and lecturer at American Management Association. During World War II, a P-51 pilot with the 4th fighter group, shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans - 8 months later he escaped and in 15 days got to Patton's army.