A white New Englander from the country-club scene, Tom Hudner passed up Harvard to fly fighters for his country. An African American sharecropper’s son from Mississippi, Jesse Brown became the navy’s first black carrier pilot, defending a nation that wouldn’t even serve him in a bar. While much of America remained divided by segregation, Jesse and Tom joined forces as wingmen in Fighter Squadron 32, and when one of the duo was shot down behind enemy lines and pinned in his burning plane, the other faced an unthinkable choice: watch his friend die or attempt history’s most audacious one-man rescue mission.