Today on Access Utah, author Margo Mowbray joins us for the hour to discuss two of her books: An Answering Flame and Havoc Red.
An Answering Flame: From the Journal of a Horseback Nurse-Midwife tells the story of one of the Frontier Nursing Service's nurse-midwives. These nurse-midwives rode horseback up Kentucky’s rugged hollows to deliver babies, treat the sick and injured day or night; winter or summer. Risking surprise encounters with desperate bootleggers, they answered the call usually alone with only what they could carry in their saddlebags. They brought care to America’s most remote families, lowering the maternity death rate below the national average.
Havoc Red: Surviving the Alaska-Siberia Route, 1943 begins with Russia pushed to the brink by Germany’s war machine. President Franklin Roosevelt agreed to an uncomfortable alliance with Joseph Stalin and sent thousands of aircraft to the battered Soviet nation by way of the Alaska-Siberia Route.
Lend-Lease pilots braved blinding arctic storms and primitive navigation delivering planes to Fairbanks. There, Russian pilots flew them on to the Eastern Front.
The Soviets demanded more and more from the White House. Fearing the loss of Russia’s loyalty, top-level deals were made, with Faustian consequences.
One man agreed to a secret delivery mission. During the severe winter of 1943 he and a pilot took off from Great Falls, Montana with black suitcases marked “Diplomatic Immunity – Havoc Red.”
But rather than becoming celebrated heroes, they were forgotten in the Yukon’s rugged terrain. One commits a desperate act and has to find a different kind of heroism on his return from the ice-bound north.
Margo writes from her home in northwestern Montana. Her newspaper career began at age 20 at one of Montana's oldest weeklies. For nearly two decades, she continued in a fulfilling career of publishing award-winning community newspapers. After selling the enterprise, she began researching stories that deserved a wider audience. Her four children were grown which allowed time for research and writing. Mowbray paused just long enough to serve a term in Montana's state Senate.
Her creative biography, An Answering Flame – Journal of a Horseback Nurse-Midwife, won the 2014 Media Award from the American College of Nurse-Midwives.
Havoc Red – Surviving the Alaska-Siberia Route 1943 reveals an untold story of World War II.
Mowbray serves on her local hospital board and is a private pilot with over twelve hundred left-seat hours.
