Astronaut Jan Davis talks about her life in aviation and the legacy of service in her family. Her memoir Air Born, tells the story of her and her father.

Her father was Ben Smotherman, a B-17 pilot in World War II, vwho aliantly fought in the European Theater of Operations before being shot down over Holland in July 1943. After enduring twenty-one months as a prisoner of war, he was finally reunited with his loved ones and was able to start a family. Years later, after perusing his Wartime Log, his daughter Jan made discoveries about her father’s experiences that shed light on her own life path. As a Space Shuttle astronaut, Jan Davis went through intensive training, flew NASA jets, and completed three spaceflights, spending over 673 hours on orbit. Her experiences and emotions during her launches and space travel echoed those of her father during his combat missions, highlighting the unshakable bond between father and daughter.

With Air Born, you can join in on a flight through history as Jan Davis relates her father’s heroic service and draws connections between his combat missions and her own spaceflights. Discover the ins and outs of pilot training in the 1940s alongside Ben Smotherman and bear witness to his harrowing capture, interrogation, and imprisonment at Stalag Luft III. Rejoice with the POWs as World War II finally ends and the prisoners are returned home to continue pursuing their life’s goals. Shadow Jan Davis as she expertly navigates a career characterized by space exploration, scientific experimentation, and phenomenal feats of engineering. And draw inspiration from the intersection of two completely different yet uniquely connected worlds brought together by a common link of family and flying.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life and Tobacco Free Adagio Health for sponsoring this event!

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We welcome writer and Executive Producer of Inside Edition Charles Lachman to talk about his new book, Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and The Elusive Enigma Machine.

The book is a white-knuckled saga of a maverick captain, nine courageous sailors, and a US Navy task force who achieved the impossible on June 4, 1944–capturing Nazi submarine U-505, its crew, technology, encryption codes, and an Enigma cipher machine.

Two days before D-Day–the course of World War II was forever changed. The hunters of the Atlantic Ocean had become the hunted, and US antisubmarine Task Group 22.3 seized a Nazi U-boat, its crew, and all its secrets. Led by a nine-man boarding party and Captain Daniel Gallery, “Operation Nemo” was the first seizure of an enemy warship in battle since the War of 1812, a victory that shortened the duration of the war. But at any moment, the mission could have ended in disaster.

Charles Lachman tells this thrilling cat-and-mouse game through the eyes of the men on both sides of Operation Nemo–German U-boaters and American heroes like Lieutenant Albert David (“Mustang”), who led the boarding party that took control of U-505 and became the only sailor to be awarded the Medal of Honor in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Three thousand American sailors participated in this extraordinary adventure; nine ordinary American men channeling extraordinary skill and bravery finished the job; and then–like everyone involved–breathed not a word of it until the war was over.

In Berlin, the German Kriegsmarine assumed that U-505 had been blown to bits by depth charges, with all hands lost at sea. They were unaware that the U-boat, its Enigma machine, and its Nazi coded messages were now in American hands. They were also unaware that the 59 German sailors captured on the high seas were imprisoned in a POW camp in Ruston, Louisiana, until their release in 1946.

A deeply researched, fast-paced World War II narrative for the ages, Charles Lachman’s Codename Nemo traces every step of this historic pursuit on the deadly seas.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life and Tobacco Free Adagio Health for sponsoring this event!