Being a master of history, (I received my master’s in March of 2009), I looked into the sky while I was at my parents home in Ephrata and I noticed there were four contrails of planes that had flown overhead. It got me to thinking about World War Two and the pictures of the contrails of the B-17 Flying Fortresses, B-24 Liberators flying over Germany and the B-29 Superfortresses doing the same over the skies of Japan. If you ever noticed you do not think of them as being dangerous. However, back in the early and mid-1940, seeing those contrails overhead meant some where there was going to be death and destruction. How did the people of Japan and Germany cope with that fact everyday? Or did they cope at all? How did the pilots of those planes cope with their missions or did they not think about what was happening below them? It makes me wonder sometimes how people coped with a simple contrail that passed overhead. I know I can not go back and experience what those people experienced but if I could would I want to? It just makes me wonder, and makes me look at contrails in a different light than what you would normally think.