Editor's note:  Written by Major Haberman, and typed up by his clerk - Darrell Gillett.  This copy was saved by Mr. Gillett.  In 2001, Gordon "Gordy" Alton (91st BG Association member, son of tail gunner S/Sgt Donald Merle Alton) recieved this copy from Mr. Gillett along with some photos.  It was promptly transcribed, with special thanks to  Linda Cline, and minor errors were corrected.

 

Many thanks to Gordy for allowing it to be posted here with the 381st BG war diaries and to Derrell Gillett for preserving this important piece of history. 

You could put sixty airplanes together in the air. But you couldn’t fly that many off a single airdrome. Limited ground facilities, the length of time needed to taxi and take0off and land, the number of ships you could get into a single traffic pattern: these and other factors imposed an absolute limit on what you could do with a single field. What you had to have was a single combat unit operating from several bases widely separated on the ground. This could not be achieved without a new framework of Air Command, a command concerned only with tactics, transcending channels of administrative detail. The Combat Wing was the new command.

 

Primitive Beginnings     In the dark days of the winter of 1942-43, a jackleg Combat Wing organization was born. They had four Groups then. General Armstrong had the 306th and Colonel Curtis E. LeHay had the 305th. All they did was throw the 91st in with the 306th under the General and the 303rd with the 305th under Colonel LeHay. That was all there was to it. Yet, even in this primitive form, it worked. General Armstrong’s Wing was the start of our organization. Proposals were submitted to the powers in Washington to legalize the Combat Wing and give a T/O and some tools to work with. If Washington was impressed, we saw nothing over here to show it. We waited until August 1943 before we were made legal.

 

The trouble was that the war couldn’t wait. Jerry didn’t care if we were legal or not. We had to have Combat Wings, so we improvised them, matching personnel wherever we could, stealing men from the Groups, sponging on the Groups for maps and supplies and quarters and offices. We had Lieutenants over Majors, Captains doing the work of Colonels. At the same time, we had officers doing enlisted chores, for we had no enlisted men. We had only de facto command – a mixture of cajoling and wheedling, and our only big stick was that we could tell the General if we didn’t get what we wanted. Fortunately, due to the good sense and good nature of our Group Commanders, we were never forced to use the big stick.

 

We Make A Start     Our Wing made its appearance on 17 May 1943, when the General and Colonel Gross arrived at Bassingbourn. We had a General and a Colonel, but what was home without an Adjutant? And, to coin a phrase, what was home without a mother? They brought with them the other two charter members of the Wing: Lt. Jules L. Moreau and Miss Prentice. Moreau was a young man whose devotions to scholarly pursuits and to the Army and deprived the legal profession of a shining light. Miss Ella, the least of whose talents was that she could take shorthand and type, had been the Boss’s Secretary at Widewing, the 8th Air Force Headquarters.

 

Bassingbourn was a nice place. It is located at the southern tip of Cambridgeshire, a mile and a half from Royston, fourteen miles from Cambridge. London was an hour and a half by train from Royston, and there were movies, pubs, and females in Cambridge. Some of the later arrivals from stations in the Bedford area, notably Thurleigh, continued to work Bedford for a while, but the distance was too great and this finally petered out, more or less. The important thing was that Bassingbourn was a station that had been built in peacetime. True, Hitler’s breath was hot on England’s neck when they built it, but there was still time to put up good substantial buildings. The other American stations all had nissen huts, which are the children of Diogenes’ barrel aired out of wedlock by the American Can Company. And the other stations had mud, cozy, slimy, animated mud, that liked nothing better than to crawl over the tops of your galoshes and worm its way between your toes. We, at least, had clean feet.

 

Our host was the 91st Group, one of the old, original four that fought the war during the bad winter of ’42-’43. Just about the time we started, Colonel Wray, original commander of the 91st, departed and the Group was turned over to Colonel Lawrence, then to Colonel Clemens (“Uncle Clem”) Wurzbach, still later to the redoubtable Colonel Claude E. Putman, who went from Squadron C.O. in the Group to Group C.O. via Thurleigh and 1st Division.

 

The 91st was our nucleus. We also began with the 351st. This was Colonel William A. (“Uncle Willie”) Hatcher’s outfit. It opened for business about the same time we did, hanging out its shingle at Polebrook, 35 miles away in the wilds of Northamptonshire. Later, we acquired the 381st, skipper Colonel Joe Nazzaro, which moved in at Ridgeway, 40 miles the other way in Essex. He stayed with us for a while, but finally in January of ’44 we lost him to higher headquarters and his executive officer, Lt. Col. Leber, took over. What happened was that they took all the stations that were close together and made Combat Wings out of them, and the ones that didn’t fit they gave to us. Thurleigh, Chelveston, and Podington, all within 5 miles of each other, were put into the 102nd, which later became the 40th and Molesworth, Kimbolton, and Grafton Underwood, all close together, were made into the 103rd, later the 41st. What we saved traveling around Bassingbourn, the only station that was not scattered over two or three miles of countryside to make them bad targets, we more than lost trying to visit our stations.

 

Colonel Gross     The Boss was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, class of 1934. Other schooling included the Air Corps Primary Flying School, Advanced Flying School – Attack course, and Air Corps Technical School. His ratings were those as Technical Observer and Senior Pilot, and he was credited with over 2,000 flying hours when he came to us.

 

In peacetime he had served in Heavy Bombardment Groups at various times as Engineering, Armament and Assistant Operations Officer. In 1940 he was Operations Officer at Bolling Field, and was in full charge of air traffic at that important station. During the movement of the 8th Air Force to the Theater of Operations, he acted as A-4 and was responsible for equipment and putting the entire force through the staging area at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, immediately prior to their movement to England. After arrival over here, he became Assistant Chief of Staff A-3, Air Service Command, and was Assistant Senior Controller during the movement of the original Air Units, which left England to take part in the invasion of North Africa in November 1942.

 

Tied to the desk throughout his first year in the Theater, the Boss wanted operational missions under his belt as fast as possible. By the end of September, he had eleven missions, or half his maximum permitted under the rules. Besides, they have a habit of grounding valuable men, and if he was going to be valuable, he had to get his missions in fast. After he had persuaded the Group that radio conversations in the air was possible and had demonstrated in practice missions that he could control our large and unwieldy formations over the VHF transmitters, we got away from silent and uncontrolled missions and began having Air Commanders, both for Combat Wings and for the Division as a whole. The Boss was Division Air Commander on a number of notable missions, including the long costly drag to Schweinfurt, Germany, on 17 August 1943. He flew to Meaulte on 13 May, Kiel on 19 May, St. Nazaire on 29 May, Wilhelmshaven on 11 June, Bremen on 13 June, Villacoublay near Paris on 26 June, Flushing, Holland on 15 August, Schweinfurt on 17 August, Amiens/Glisy airdrome on 31 August, Romilly-sur-Seine on 15 September, Emden on 27 September, and Wesel, Germany on 7 November.

 

The Charter Members     To help the General and the Colonel get the Wing organized Lt. Col. Harry J. Holt and Captain Roy M. Ahalt came up from VIII Bomber Command on DS. Colonel Holt was the former C.O. of the 367th Bomb Squadron of the 306th Group, the “Clay Pigeon Squadron” of Saturday Evening Post fame, and was the first of a series of officers from that Group who came to join our Wing at various times. These two were quickly joined by two Cum Laude graduates of the 305th, Captain Robert Woodrow Smith and Captain Frank Dickinson Yaussi, both Sunkist lads from California. Smitty, alias “The Mole”, was rock-ribbed and a solid citizen; a veteran of 25 missions with the 306th during the rough winter when doing your 25 without getting shot down meant that you knew your formation flying and could make a B-17 talk. “Youse-Mouse” was the first American invader of Germany in World War II; the lead bombardier on the first raid to any German target by U.S. Bombers. These two came to us on 23 May. Like all the rest, they remained assigned to their Group and came here as attached personnel, since our provisional or de facto set-up made this necessary.

 

On 27May, the A-3 staff consisting of Smitty and Yaussi was joined by an A02 organization. This consisted at first of Lt. Harold J. Hanes of the 91st Group. Hal was an old globetrotter and backgammon expert from Michigan, who had been commissioned out of civilian life because of his special knowledge of the Near East and two or three modern Semitic languages. This, of course, made it inevitable that he would ultimately wind up here in England, where he received special training under Major Errol RT. Holms, the British Flak Liaison Officer. In addition to general A-2 work, Hal specialized as Oberflakmeister, or Anti-aircraft Gunfire Officer, in our Wing.

 

Captain Ahalt and Colonel Holt left us on 30 May to return to Bomber Command. On 2 June we acquired our Wing Combat Intelligence Officer, Lt. P.W. Haberman, Jr., a former New York ambulance chaser and legal windbag. Phil also came to us from the 306th Group, although he had to serve a term of four months at 1st Bomb Wing before he was admitted to our “Country Club” at Bassingbourn. Immediately thereafter Phil began to blossom. He soon became our unofficial nom-de-plume, the official spot being reserved for the more technical mind of our Adjutant, Jules Moreau. Phil also assumed first place as our post, inventor, historian, and idea man. In fact, as one reflects, it is hard to remember many things that have happened in our Wing that “The Judge” hasn’t been in on in one way or another.

 

Meanwhile, we had found it impossible to carry on our business in our hats, as we had done at first. An office was needed. We cast an eagle eye on the second floor of Station Headquarters, where the Great White Father, Major John J. McNaboe, a former State Senator in New York, presided after the fashion of a local District Leader. Fortunately, we had a General in our Wing, so the Senator was relieved of one large and two small rooms with little difficulty and only a small amount of wailing. We set up the big room as our Operations Room, complete with a blackboard and telephones, and our A-2’s started covering the Celotex with their asexual pinups. Soon we had a situation map, 1:500,000, covered with red blobs for flak areas, little airplanes to show where the Jerry fighters were supposed to be based, radar lines, and plenty of colored twine and bright-headed pushpins to lay out our devious plans against the enemy. This map was to become the altar before which we practiced many strange rites in the small hours of the morning as our Wing carried the war to Mr. Hitler.

 

WING PROBLEMS:     Our responsibility was defined in a letter signed by Brig. Gen. Raywood S. Hansel, Jr., 1st Bomb Wing Commander, dated 28 May 1942, as the tactical efficiency of the Groups of their Combat Wings on operational missions and “the integration of those Groups into a single, cohesive fighting machine, capable of operating as a single unit”.

 

This was no small job. Our Groups were good, but it was our business to make them better in their work by any and every possible means. Also, we had to fly and fight them as a unit. The Boss knew what he was up against. First, he knew that everything in the tradition of the Army and the Air Corps was designed to promote morale by having every outfit believe that it was the only really good outfit in the whole show. He knew that this organizational pride made our Groups a bit too quick to find fault with the other fellow, a little prone to feel that if anything went wrong it was because the other outfit was not on the ball. Before you could get a unified fighting organization you had to overcome that feeling. You had to throw the fellows from the various Groups together. You had to wheedle them, criticize them and plague them just the right amount, teach them to air their mutual grievances face to face, to learn to understand the other fellow’s problems and respect him for what he was doing, to think of the Combat Wing formation as a whole and not of what was best for the individual Groups. It took a lot of starting, but its motive power soon became self-generative. Combat Wing critiques were the best medium for this job. It was hard to get three Uncles, Uncle Willie Hatcher and Uncle Joe Nazzaro and Uncle Clem Wurzbach, to help with this problem: they were old-timers in this racket. At the critiques, we made the youngsters state their grievances, argue out their disagreements, sympathize with the other fellow, and laugh a little at themselves. After a while, not too long, they got the idea. From then on there was no trouble with Group rivalry.

 

There were other problems, too. One of them was getting the Groups to fly better formations and weld them into a good, tight Combat Wing formation. This was a matter of training, but not one you could handle by sitting in the office. We made it a habit to go out in the air and watch the formation, both on practice missions and when they were getting together to go fight the war. Sometimes we went out in our trusty “Oxfighters”, Airspeed Oxfords “B”-BAKER and “C”-CHARLIE. Later on, we traded “C-Charlie” in for an A-20, and about the same time they gave us an L-4B, known to all but the Army as a Piper Cub or Maytag Messerschmitt. Sometimes we borrowed a B-17 from the 91st Group to go along and observe. A “famous first” was the occasion when the Boss, exasperated by the skepticism of the combat crews concerning the feasibility of good radio communication in the air, took a formation of 36 B-17’s over Cambridge and Ely and Thetfor and drove it around like a taxicab by giving orders from an observing aircraft outside the formation. After that, they believed.

 

From the very start, our Wing pioneered in the field of communications. After our Groups had been sold on the use of VHF, on 30 August 1943 the Boss made the first improvised and controlled attack on any target in which VHF was used to direct the accomplishment of a mission. That day we were sent over to attack the airdrome and storage facilities of the GAF at Romilly-sur-Seine, about a hundred miles east of Paris. The Boss was leading the Combat Wing, which was the first to penetrate and make an attack. When he got to the target, he found it socked in, so he warned off the other Combat Wings over the VHF and saved them needless miles over hostile territory. On the way in, he had observed that Amiens/Glisy airdrome, a juicy target, was wide open, so on the way back he announced that we would attack it. He announced the IP and directed the deployment of forces for the attack and the re-assembly after bombs away. The attack was a complete success. This was a monumental development, for the first time we had made an un-briefed attack on an un-briefed target, with the same ease and precision as though the details of the attack had been planned on the ground.

 

General Williams at Division was quick to perceive the implications of this one. At a subsequent critique, he announced that previously our formations had been merely led. After takeoff there was no control over the attack than in the case of a projectile once fired from a gun. Now we would have command, as distinguished from mere leadership. A truly revolutionary development in our work.

 

We played our part in carrying forward the implications of this change. The next time the Boss went on a mission, he was designated Air Commander of the Division forces. To meet his new responsibilities, we worked out a new form of briefing the Air Commander, preparing for him a special four-leaf glassine folder containing all the information he might need in the course of the mission. It was truly a brief of the entire mission, in the course of the mission. It contained all the details of the missions from the assembly through the attack and back to the bases. A highly detailed map of the route was included, showing the location of the assigned targets and other places which might be available as targets of opportunity, maps and photographs of all targets, locations of flak areas, fighter rendezvous points with timings, check points to be made good, VHF call signs, etc., etc. In preparing this, we followed a principle the Boss had discovered: it had always been the practice to select secondary and last resort targets along the return leg of the route. This seemed logical and no one had ever questioned it: after all, if you couldn’t hit the primary, then you would want something to hit on the way back. What the Boss realized was that the important thing was to get a look at your second-string target on the way in so that you could make the attack under conditions you would know about before you got there. The Amiens/Glisy raid had proved the soundness of the principle and it soon was officially adopted.

 

The mission brief and the pre-selection of targets of opportunity also secured universal acceptance. When we pre-selected such targets, we called the other Combat Wings and told them about it. Presently, the others were doing the same thing, and by tacit understanding it was agreed that the Combat Wing leading the Division would always select such targets and pass them on to the others. It was never necessary to publish any directive on this subject: the idea was a natural and came to be accepted simply as a custom of our trade. The mission brief paid off, too. On the Schweinfurt raid of 17 August 1943, the Combat Wing kept out of every flak area on the route both going and coming. We were not even fired at except at the target. When the outfit got back to base, the lead Navigator all but kissed us.

 

Then we carried the VHF business one step further. All Combat Wings were still having assembly trouble. Up there in the air, you couldn’t tell one Group from another. Wrong outfits were always forming up on each other and right outfits would snub each other in the air due to lack of recognition. Even when two outfits wanted to join up, neither knew exactly what the other was going to do. They weren’t allowed to call each other up and get things straightened out: radio security was a sacred cow we had inherited from the early days of the RAF, when any R/T chatter was an engraved announcement to Jerry that we were coming over. Sacred cows or not, in this case, we wondered whether radio silence was worth the price we paid in confusion and abortions to attain it. It was taken up with General Williams and immediately the ban was lifted. This was enormous help. Assembly was simplified a thousand-fold, climbs were adjusted to the climbing ability of the tail-end Charlies, superchargers were saved and abortions reduced.

 

However, this brought a new kind of trouble. The boys started abusing their new freedom of speech. It didn’t do any harm to talk once you reached a modest altitude: Jerry’s radar would tell him you were there whether you talked or not. But it was another thing to tell Jerry that you were coming over on business, how far you were going, and when and where you were taking off. And the boys were innocently doing these things all the time, once the ban was lifted. So we put some new security measures into effect. We ordered radio silence to be maintained until the radar screen had been entered. Then all messages would be kept to a minimum and the R/T used only in cases of absolute necessity. All discussion of places and altitudes had to be in cryptic terms: we used the “Angel-Devil” system of the fighter boys for altitudes and our assembly line would be from Point A to Point B instead of from Cambridge to Ely.

 

We never told Division about this. We knew that Division was in the habit of monitoring all R/T channels. One day the Boss came back from Division with a grin on his face. Here the other Combat Wings were blathering away all over the sky, giving away their courses and altitudes and constantly jabbering about nothing at all. But the 1st Combat Wing channel was dignified as a judge; practically unbroken silence, with every now and then a remark about “Devils three approaching Point ‘A’. Presently, there was a directive from Division. Our system was to be adopted by all Combat Wings. This time, we all grinned.

 

LEAD TEAMS:     We had some other “famous firsts”, too. We were the first to dream up and use the idea of lead teams, screened to lead operations and never fly on the wing. The trouble was that your leaders never get a chance to practice their bombing. Whenever the weather was good enough to fly, Bomber Command threw a mission at us. If you had three or four first-class bombing teams in a Group, they had to fly the mission unless they happened to be on a pass. And on our missions, nobody used a bombsight except the lead ship of each Group. The rest were toggleers, as we called them, just sitting there on the bomb run with their eyes glued on the lead ship. When they saw the bombs come out, the bombardier whacked the toggle switch. You couldn’t develop leaders that way. The Boss got General Williams, who had taken over at 1st Division, to approve the idea of setting aside four teams in each Group that would not fly missions unless they led the Group. Thus, when there was a mission day, one team would fly the mission and the rest would go and bomb Scares Rock or Breast Sands or do Camera bombing. This was an idea that really worked. It improved our bombing and was soon made official throughout the Division.

 

TO GERMANY VIA PHILADELPHIA:     Another one was the form that started as “Philadelphia” and went through many editions, “Baltimore”, “Chicago”, “Seattle”, “Yorker”, “X-ray”, or whatever name Smitty happened to think up for his latest creation. This came about because they seldom left us enough time to get our Combat Wing supplements to field orders over the Teletype. Generally, we would get an alert about six o’clock in the evening and sit around the station and sweat out the field order until midnight, more or less. When we got the field order hot from the Teletype we would discover that the Groups would have to take off at six or seven in the morning. That meant that they would brief at 2 or 3 A.M. They needed at least a couple of hours to make their arrangements and get set for the briefing. That left us about two hours or less to tell them what our assembly route would be and give our other instructions and you had to give poor old Kurtzie, our harassed navigator, a little time to monkey with his Mercater, his Weems plotter, and his E-6B confusser. And with the Teletype taking from two to three hours to get our annex through to Polebrook and Ridgewell, we were really behind the 8-Ball. Dutifully, we learned the mystic symbolism of the signals crowd, “PLX VIA BMP VIA RIG VIA BMP BAS BIA BMP BMP V BAS”. Carefully we heeded our missive’s “URGENT SECRET SENT IN CLEAR AUTH COL GROSS”, BUT STILL Menees of Polebrook and Delano of Ridgeway would call in agonized tones, “Hey, for Chrissakes, gimme a route”. Finally, in desperation, we invented our form. This was a canned annex with blanks, all numbered. When we had everything doped out, all you had to do was call up Ridgewell and say, “Hey, you got a Philadelphia?” When the other end was ready, you just called a lot of gibberish over the phone and the guy at the other end filled out the blanks. It worked. Best of all, it satisfied the customers.

 

THE FIGLEAF KIDS:     Some of our ideas were on the higher side. The Boss thought that we ought to have some way of encouraging Groups to cut down on their abortives by giving an award to those with the best records. We got up a plaque to be awarded for having two missions in a row with no abortive aircraft. It was a symbolic gadget: a B-17 aircraft doing the immemorial job of Doctor Stork, carrying two squalling brats slung in a diaper. No abortions, twice. Uncle Willie’s Group copped the award right away to go with the plaque, so we made up a little gadget to hang underneath, which we called a “Figleaf Cluster”. Later, when we acquired a VHF ground station we needed a call sign. What could have been more appropriate than the same old term? We became “Figleaf”. Still later, when we worked a weather ship into our missions it became “Flying Figleaf”.

 

PROF. HABERMAN’S PATENT CONFUSER:     Some of our ideas were stillborn. After all, you couldn’t expect everything to click. Haberman, the legal eagle, got the idea that you could help bombing by having a jigger on the bombardier’s map that would show him how his crosshairs ought to sit on the ground after he had his bombsight set up. It consisted of a transparent plastic disc with the crosshairs on it and a compass rose. You cantered the thing on the aiming point on the map and adjusted it to fit the heading with the compass rose. The Boss took one look at it and said that it would be a big help if you could fix it up so that you could not only use it for lining up on the target, but also to sight on a point outside of the target area. What you needed was a system to sight on one point and then drop late so you could hit what you were really after. If you could do that, you would have a means of beating the Jerry smoke screens, which were bothering us a lot. Sure, the Norden Bombsight could drop a bomb in a pickle barrel, or at least that was what the publicity said, but suppose you couldn’t see the pickle barrel? This might be the answer.

 

So the professor went down to Bomber Command to see the Big Brains. He found a solution ready-made. Major Jerry Goerlings, he of the perspective maps and the landfall strips and other bombing-made-easy-in-three-easy-lessons gadgets, had been fussing with the same problems. So we put a grid on the disc and we worked out a series of delays for different distances and ground speeds. The Kurtzie and Yaussi tried it out on a camera-bombing mission over Cambridge. We took a map of Cambridge and out of the center of the town to simulate the smoke screen. Instead of knowing what to hit and then not being able to see it, they could see all right, but they didn’t know what they were aiming at. The target, unknown to them, was the railway yard. It was a good thing they didn’t have bombs in the ships, because they hit it on the button.

 

General Williams was most enthusiastic when he saw what we had produced. Orders went out directing intensive training in all Groups in the use of the jigger. Then before it was used on a real show, along came our pathfinder force, with its trick gadgets that made it possible to bomb and do contact navigation over a solid 10/10ths undercuts. We thought the jigger was washed out. Later, we heard otherwise.  It seemed that the boys were using it, but it was just another gadget to them and they made no special point of reporting on it. Did it help hit targets? Well, maybe yes and maybe no. You couldn’t be sure of anything in this game.

 

MORE PROBLEMS:     Biggest of all the problems was assembly. The Boss saw that one coming long before it kicked us in the face. Everybody was pretty well agreed that it was unhealthy to go fight the war with less than 40 airplanes on hand; the Combat Wing Leaders would be authorized to abandon any mission and go home. The Boss knew that no matter how good the Groups were it all went for nothing if you couldn’t put them together in the air.   And we were going to have trouble, more trouble all the time as the strength of our forces increased and the weather settled down to its usual winter routine of one cloud later sitting on top of another like a nice, gooey birthday cake. The Boss and Smitty and, later on, Terry the Tiger put more sweat into this one than anything else. It paid off, too. Each of the other Combat Wings had a couple of abandoned missions chalked up before the good old First and Worst ever muffed one. And when we did finally foul up, the weather was so bad that the others did too so we didn’t feel too bad about it.

 

The Boss used to worry about statistics, too. No comfort to repeat the old refrain, “Lies, damn lies and statistics”. Somehow, we seemed to get the short end on the statistical reports when we didn’t deserve it. For example, one time our Combat Wing was the only one in the Division that got together and went off to fight the war. The others failed to assemble and went home. Then when we got over France, our boys ran into weather they couldn’t penetrate, without attacking a target. As a result, when the poop came out with the percentages on it, we had the highest percentage of sorties NOT attacking a target in the Division. We were like a saxophone player; we blew in sweet and it came out sour. We tried to do things about things like that. We usually got sympathy, but that was about all.

 

Still, we didn’t do too badly. We had a lot of firsts among Groups and Combat Wings of the Division. We managed to keep up a pretty steady record of being first in things like keeping aircraft in commission. We flew darn good formations, thanks to the Boss’s constant insistence on that subject, and as a result our losses were lower than the others, as a rule. Our bombing didn’t shine at first, but then when we started we had two brand new Groups and the third, 91st, was just going into the period when all of its old and seasoned crews were graduating and they had to start over. But we progressed, we got better, and when we were six months old, we had the lowest circular error in the Division. We were pretty proud of that, you may be sure.

 

CEILING AND VISIBILITY UNSPEAKABLE:     There wasn’t any doubt about one thing: the big enemy was old man weather. We always had a feeling that if we could have brought over not only our ships, but also the weather to fly them in, we could have had things pretty much our own way after a while. We thought that there were plenty of times when we tore enough Jerry Fighters on a couple of good missions to send his down to the count of ten. But then, just as we had him on the ropes, old man weather would ring the bell and we would have to go back and stew in our corners for two or three weeks, while Jerry’s seconds gave him a good rubdown and brought him back in to fight some more.

 

They had a saying, “If you don’t like the weather here in England just wait fifteen minutes”. That was just about right. What we were up against was a seemingly endless succession of weak fronts. Sometimes four or five of them would go by in a single day between sunup and sundown. You could take off in perfect visibility, fly to another airdrome only a few miles away and not be able to land when you got there. The G-2 department aged ten years one day when the Boss and Smitty flew the Oxford over to Debden, you could see straight down. P-47’s that lived at Debden were being diverted to other airdromes in the middle of just shooting landings. Well, the Boss navigated us in, taking samples off of all the haystacks that we passed.

 

There were cases of B-17’s taking off under good conditions and then getting torn up by line squalls that nobody expected. One time, the 91st was in the middle of taking off for a mission. Ten ships were off when Bang! Suddenly there was a ground fog on the airdrome so think that a ship that started to take off with plenty of visibility was on instruments before it got to the end of the runway. Winds were crazy, too, and some navigators had to learn about them the hard way. One new crew went to assemble over a splasher beacon above the overcast. Nobody showed up, so they circled for a while. Finally, they got tired and letdown. When they broke through they saw an airdrome, so they started to sit down. Flak! They climbed again cursing the stupid ground defense boys.   Tried again. More flak. This time they decided to try somewhere else. Headed West. Next letdown they were over water. The navigator admitted that he was lost, so they decided to fly west and see what they could find. Presently they saw land and came in at low altitude. More flak. They headed north, flew a while, decided to go back. More flak. This time they were convinced and came home, guided by five Mosquitoes dispatched by the ever-watchful British. What happened was that 100 MPH winds had blown them over France while they were, as they had thought, circling and they had tried to land at St. Omer. The next place they called was Cherbourg. Things like that lost us a lot of additional hair.

 

The first winter of the VIII Bomber Command, you had to be pretty persnickety about weather. It had to be good for take-off, CAVU at the target or nearly so, and good for return to bases. You can’t do an awful lot of bombing in this Theater if you have to wait for conditions like that. It had changed pretty radically by the time our Combat Wing really got under way. All you needed was reasonably good visibility for take-off and return to base. We could take off before dawn, assemble above an overcast, fly to the target and bomb through 10/10ths ceiling and visibility and then we returned. But this increased versatility brought new problems. That’s one thing about war and flying. Every problem solved brings two new ones to take its place. We found that you get new kinds of trouble. When there was heavy cloud, there was bound to be a lot of moisture in the air, and moisture meant contrails. Back home, fellows earned a living doing skywriting. Here you couldn’t help it. Flying an airplane at high altitude through saturated air caused the moisture to condense and you did skywriting even though you didn’t want to. That did a lot of things. It made you shining targets for flak. It obscured the view of the tail gunners and made things too easy for Jerry. It sometimes made it impossible for the guys in the back to see the leader, and busted up the formations. Then, as often as not, the high clouds would build up to the point where we could not fly a formation through a cloudbank: you wouldn’t have any formation at all when they came out the other side. Things like that made it pretty tough.

 

THE HUN BITES BACK:     The worst thing, however was the way we educated Jerry. Until the summer of 1943, we had no fighter escort to speak of. Sometimes, especially at first, we had Spits as far as they could go, which was 30 to 40 miles inside the French or Belgian or Dutch coast. But the Spit was too much of a thoroughbred for this kind of work. It had lots of flash and punch, but it was no workhorse for the long drag. However, we had proved that the Fort in Combat Wing Formation, was more than a match for any ordinary fighter armed with machine guns or 20mm cannon. By the time they got close enough to shoot, our concentrated crossfire from a hundred or more 50’s had torn them to bits. It was obvious to Jerry as well as ourselves that we could do what we had failed miserably at during the Battle of Britain. Sure, he knocked down Forts. Any guy that got out of formation and straggled was a gone turkey. But not once had he ever broken up an Eighth Air Force formation or kept us from penetrating to the target and bombing it. We are pretty darn proud of that.

 

Then in the summer of 1943, he started experimenting with new ideas. First he tried air-to-air bombing. Dive-bombers, Ju 87 Stukas, throwing things at formation from screaming dives. Level bombing from above. Fighter-bombers, medium and heavies. He tried to throw bombs at us from our own level. There were occasional successes at this business, but they were freaks. It didn’t work, not in any real sense. Then he tried airborne flak. Twin-engine jobs would sit out of range of our 50’s and throw stuff at us out of 37mm cannons or bigger. That didn’t work either. Finally they got something. It was one of our own ideas, adopted the way the Jerries copied everything we had. We had made a success of the bazooka, or rocket projectile, against tanks. We had shown that the rocket has the enormous advantage of a heavy missile without any recoil. Two GI’s could carry a bazooka on their shoulders and then blow a tank with it. So Jerry mounted rocket projectors on airplanes. It worked, worse luck. It wasn’t only that the rockets could knock down airplanes. They could also bust up formations. General Williams and the Boss found that out on the first Schweinfurt mission, 17 August 1943, when we lost 27 airplanes out of the Combat Wing. We were very happy to get the rest of the boys back.

 

By the time we had our second mission to Schweinfurt, on 14 October, Jerry had the combination. Our Combat Wing, although it led the show for the second time against this toughest of all targets, got off light with a loss of only three aircraft. The other outfits paid plenty. The 305th Group never joined up with its own Combat Wing, but flew low position on us. They caught it: left England with 17 ships and came back home with 2. Losses for the day totaled 60 heavies. This was bad business. We pasted the target, the most important we had ever attacked. In the abstract, destruction of 50% to the Hus’s all-important ball-bearing production was worth almost any price. On the other hand, we certainly couldn’t afford sixty bombers on a single mission. The public back home hit the ceiling. The big shots were quick to rush into print with explanations. General Arnold said that there was a tip-off: Jerry had five hours advance notice of the mission. Maybe so, but you certainly didn’t need to assume any cloak-and-dagger stuff to know what had happened. The play was pretty obvious. The weather map would have told Jerry pretty much what we would probably do: it was always more or less that way. Then, it was possible that our own boys chattering over VHF during assembly had given the show away. Jerry never knew what the target was; that was a cinch, because he had every smoke screen going in the neighborhood except the one at Schweinfurt. But the boys had told him when and where we were going to leave the coast and a lot of other stuff too, by not using their heads and their mikes at the same time. However badly we kept radio silence, the thing probably would have been the same. Fighters move twice as fast as bombers, and when you spend three hours going in to your target, it’s not surprising that Jerry managed to marshal stuff from all over the map. We have had tough and voluminous opposition every time we have gone deep into Germany, and you can bank on it that we meet the same fighters, more or less, wherever we go. We know of cases where Jerry has moved nearly four hundred miles and made interceptions when we were on relatively short penetrations.

 

OUR SMALL FRIENDS:     No, it looked as though Jerry had finally stumbled on at least a partial answer to the unescorted bomber. Massed defensive fire was no good against a weapon that out-ranged you and was effective at the same time. Only one counter-answer was immediately apparent: fighter escort. It was pretty lucky that we had our P-47 Thunderbolts and P-38 Lightenings and, a little later, our P-51 Mustangs, coming into action different critters from the RAF fighters, which had been designed for short-range interception over England. You don’t need endurance to defend this country; the distances are too short. You can cover most of industrial England in a fast job in 30 minutes. What you need is a flashy job that can get to altitude in nothing flat, fight the hell out of anything that fires for 20 minutes and then scrambles back to base for more gas and shells, i.e. the good Spits and Hurricanes. American fighters, on the other hand, were designed with our more impressive distances in mind. The P-47’s could help us out over Bremen or the Ruhr, from English bases, which was an eye-opener to the British as well as to us when we were shown. The P-38’s and 51’s we were told, had more endurance. They could go as far as we could, at least on paper, and we had hopes that it would work out that way. And they were at least a match for the Jerries even under the handicap of working as far from their bases. They could knock down the Jerry twin-engine jobs as well as the singles that were hampered by rockets, like so many ducks. Best of all was the attitude of the fighter boys, who took the view that they [escorted] “big Friends” to the target and bringing them home. What’s more they were eager about it, always trying to add a few miles to their range and staying with us at times long after the fuel indicator said, “Go west, young man”. Our boys were plenty grateful, you may be sure.

 

Another thing about the fighter boys was their constant watchfulness over the guys that got knocked out of our formations. Before the fighters came, any ship that lost formation “had it”, as the RAF boys used to say. But after we got the fighters a green-green flare was the signal for “I’m in trouble: fighters please”. In a jiffy there would be four or five P-47’s hovering around the cripple warding off attacks and mothering him back to the coast. At one fighter critique we went to, one P-47 Group reported some suspicious single-engine jobs wandering up and down the enemy coast looking for trouble. “We had to meet the bombers”, said the pilots regretfully, “so we couldn’t stop and play”. Another piped up, “Good thing you didn’t. That was us, patrolling for stragglers”. We appreciated that too.

 

Anyway, after the Schweinfurt business, the powers that be decided that for the time being we would stay inside fighter range and fly only missions where full escort to the target and back could be provided. The boys liked that fine. Sooner or later, however, we would have to go back to the long, tough drags, beyond fighter range, in order to get at the vital targets that Jerry had constructed, as he thought, safely out of range. What was to happen, we didn’t know. This history will have to give the answer to that one in a later page.

 

WE GROW SOME MORE:     As time progressed, our staff had an irresistible tendency to expand. On 5 June 1943, Lt. Raymond Y. Kurtz came to us from the 91st Group. Kurtzie (pronounced “Koitzie” in our best Brooklynese) was a veteran of 25 rough, tough missions with his Group, one of the original guys who came over with the Group. Before he became a Navigator, he used to play with figures in a large New York Bank. His discipline in adding pennies made him pretty good at adding miles, and he had an eagle eye for checkpoints and a memory that never forgot anything. We used to say that he was a chronic sufferer from “total recall”. When the Combat Wing celebrated, which it invariably did when there was a birthday or a promotion or sometimes, nothing beyond the fact that it seemed like a good idea at the time, Kurtzie would sometimes get would up and regale us with always earthy and sometimes profound observations on life in general and the life of a Navigator in particular. His stories rambled considerably; to him one fact was as important as another and he found it impossible to follow the straight path of his narrative when there were so many enticing alleys and sidetracks full of lurid detail of scientific and psychological interest.

 

On 8 June, Captain Percy C. Young came from 1st Wing. He was an old revenuer from the Income Tax Bureau in Washington, had been an assistant S-2 in the 303rd Group. His stay with us was short: after a few weeks he left us for the 381st Group.

 

11 June brought us Capt. Ashcraft, a graduate pilot from the 305th Group at Chelveston. We were shorthanded in the Operations section by this time, and Hugh was loaned to us temporarily pending more permanent arrangements. Soon he, too, left us to become Assistant Controller at 1st Bomb Wing, where he soon was given a Majority.

 

On 13 June, we became a real outfit. We acquired our first enlisted man, 12 of them, together with 2nd Lt. Chester L. Otstot. All of them were waifs of the soon-to-be abolished 40th Bomb Wing. That was a deal we over here never understand. We were growing, there was no doubt of that, and our need for senior officers was beyond debate. We had the material: the flying officers who had graduated from operations and ground guys who had helped them pioneer the first winter of our sorrows. These were seasoned, experienced guys with know-how; there wasn’t a 2nd Lieutenant among them who didn’t know plenty of things that nobody back home could possibly be expected to know. We needed two things: a T/O so that fellows like these could be given rank commensurate with their training and responsibilities, and a lot of nice, bright, shiny new 2nd Lieutenants to start learning the business from the ground up the way the others had done. The last thing on earth the Division needed, or at least as we thought, was a lot of rank fresh from the States that would have to learn their jobs from fellows two or three grades below them. Also, the next to last thing we wanted was a complete headquarters outfit, green from home and designed to manage outfits with plenty of savvy. To our chagrin, what we got was three Bomb Wing Hqtrs’ outfits, the 40th, 41st, and 45th, complete with commanding Officers, Colonels, Majors, Hqtrs. Squadrons and all. There was nothing to do with them. They sent them in turn to 1st Division and then to 1st Wing where the poor fellows had to live in tents and sit around with nothing to do. There was nothing to do with these outfits but break them up and distribute their men where they would fit in. Lieutenants were easily disposed of, Captains difficult, field officers impossible. After all, it was the same story in every Group: guys who had been over here and were the beginning, the eager early worms that had worked hard and shown stuff and were still lieutenants. If there was a T/O vacancy, you couldn’t move in a Captain fresh from come and shut off their hopes of promotion by filling the vacancy with a guy who was far less valuable and deserving than the old-timers. Six months later, as we write this, nearly all of them have been placed and have proven themselves worthy so I reckon we were wrong, but you gotta gripe about something.

 

TRANSIENTS AND PERMANENTS:     Our Combat Wing got some pretty good guys by the deal. Otstot, a salty Pennsylvania Dutchman, took over as our A-4 and Transportation Officer.   In his spare time he acted as Assistant Adjutant. We acquired T/Sgt. Herbert Williams, who had turned down a chance to get into bigger if not better things in order to insure that he would get into Combat Intelligence, Sgt. William D. Brown, who promptly became our top kick and Moreau’s private stooge, Cpl. Maurice Brunault, destined to become the work-horse for the A-3 gang. Others included Pvt. Murphy, known as the bicycle merchant due to his strange habit of buying bicycles for L-9 and selling them for L-6, and, last but not least, the inevitable Geremina celebrated his arrival by going AWOL within the first 24 hours. His praiseworthy rubber-saving career came to an end several months later as a result of an unfortunate experiment with the center of gravity of a quarter-ton command car. After that, Geremina painted ceilings for a living.

 

Like other Combat Wings, we had a procession of distinguished visitors ranking officers who came to us en route to assume commands in order to pick up some of our alleged wisdom. Among these were Lt. Col. J.J. Preston, formerly of the 305th Group, who came to us pending assignment elsewhere.

 

Another was Colonel J.K. Lacey, who later became C.O. of the 41st and subsequently the 94th Combat Wings. Still another was Colonel Howard Moore, who spent time with us and with our Groups before taking his command of the 482nd Pathfinder Group at Alconbury.

 

The shortest career of any in our Wing was that of Lt. Col. James F. Wilson. Jimmy had been C.O. of the 423rd Squadron, 306th Group, and then Group Air Executive. When General Armstrong left us and the Boss resigned as Chief of Staff to take over the show, we needed a new Executive. They gave us Jimmy, and all of us but especially the former 306-ers, were happy to have him. He was like Solomon Grundy: attached on Monday, arrived on Tuesday, went to the hospital on Wednesday, relieved from attachment on Thursday. What happened was that Captain Raymond J. Check, the last remaining original pilot of Jimmy’s old squadron, was on this 25th and last mission. Nothing would hold Jimmy back: he had to go along. It was an easy one. Triequeville, just inside the French coast, a mere romp. During the few minutes of combat, a 20mm shell entered the cockpit, killed Check and started a fire, which burned Jimmy badly about the face and hands. Jimmy brought the ship back none-the-less. For this, he received the DSC and as a result of his injuries he was assigned to the Zone of the Interior. We hated to see him go.

 

To take his place, they gave us Lt. Col. Woodrow W. Dunlop, whose middle name was not Wilson. He came to us from being Assistant A-3 at 1st Wing on 29 June and stayed until 19 August, when he became Air Executive at the 381st at Ridgewell.

 

Our next accession, on 1st July, was 1st Lt. Roger A. Prior. He came from the 303rd Group S-2 section, where he had made an enviable reputation as a teacher of Intelligence subject to combat crews. He joined our A-2 section and also took on the duties of Wing Statistical, or Numbers Racket, Officer. Inevitably, he was known to us as Roger the Lodger.

 

WHO DOES THE DUTY OF THE DUTY OFFICER?     The same day gave us our second legal eagle: 2nd Lt. Francis B. Clark, of Boston and Harvard. Clarkie became our invaluable, indispensable chief duty officer. We liked him fine, in spite of his dry, deadpan, incisive humor, the cause of much occasional and often deserved squirming.

 

It was good to have a regular duty officer. War business is different from peace business in many ways, one of the chief being that the war has no legal holidays, time off or excuses for not being on the job all the time. It didn’t matter if everything was as quiet as a mouse. You never could tell: the phone might ring or the Teletype grind at 3 o’clock in the morning, long after Bomber Command had told everybody to sign off for the night. We insisted on our Groups having a duty officer on hand at all hours, not just a guy to take messages, but a fellow who knew what to do or who to get a hold of it he didn’t. Obviously, we had to have one ourselves. Until we got a complement of at least three duty officers, the rest of us had to take turns doing the watch trick, sleeping if at all, on a cot with three biscuit-mattresses in our Operations Room.

 

Then on the 21st of July, we were given another duty officer, 1st Lt. Wilson A. Hermann, and he was joined a week later by Lt. William C. Hutchings. This was a real break. With three duty officers, you had continuity in the very important work of the duty desk: keeping track of the numbers of crews and aircraft available for operations, seeing that all operational matters were duly and properly coordinated with the Groups, taking care of the assignments of practice bombing ranges and the thousand and one other things that are the daily grist of the Operational Mill.

 

“TIGER, TIGER, BURNING BRIGHT”     19 August was a bid day in our Wing: on it, we were joined by Terry the Tiger, Lt. Colonel Henry W. Terry, our new Chief of Staff. This was a big event for the ex-Thurleigh boys. Tiger was another 306-er, a very special one. He had been a marked guy from the day he joined the 306th while it was forming out at Wendover, Utah. Haberman, the S-2-er had never forgotten that it was the Tiger who first took him for a ride in a B-17 when he was so green in the Air Corps that he wondered if ground guys were ever allowed inside them. The Tiger came to the 306th as a Lieutenant, but nobody was surprised that it took him less than a year to trade his one-bar in for silver oak leaves. He wasn’t even a flight commander when he started with the old 367th, but it wasn’t long before he was a Squadron Commander in his own right. He had the 306th when it earned the name of the “Fightin’, bitin’, Squadron”, with the almost unbelievable record of flying 41 consecutive missions under his command without losing a single airplane. They know that things like that don’t happen by accident; when they happen, then you know you have got a guy in charge who can run an outfit. And not only that, but anybody who knows Tiger will tell you that he has a mind like a razor, gets the point before you have finished telling him, and no horse feathers on him, not a one. He has recently been promoted to a full Chicken Colonel and we all heartily endorsed it.

 

24 August, Major Elbert G. Sandoz, of the 91st, came to us as Wing Communications Officer, to be succeeded after a few months by Captain Warren Dewlen of the 381st. Sandy was one of the lucky ones to be sent back to the States. Signals Officers were always lucky that way. Not that we wanted to quit; in fact, we all had a sneaking feeling that we were probably better off over here, but there wasn’t a guy who didn’t have a chronic case of homesickness that he spent half of his time keeping in the background. It would be a pretty good deal, we thought, to be sent home because you were needed there.

 

THE GHOST WALKS     All this time, we were still sweating out that T/O. The Boss finally got tired of waiting, so he got the Groups we were assigned to do something. 29 August was a red-letter day, a banner day. Smitty and Yaussi became Majors, Kurtzie and Moreau Captains, and the Boss had a birthday. These were AUS-AC promotions, and approved by Eighth Air Force Headquarters. A few days later, Haberman made Captain, and then Hanes. These two took a little longer to come down, because they were AUS and had to go to Theater Headquarters ETOUSA for orders. There was celebrating in the ranks.

 

Then – Ah miracle! – came the T/O. September the 17th the 1st Combat Bombardment Wing (H) was activated and all personnel were assigned. No longer provisional, we were legal at least and here for keeps. Our morning report had figures in the assigned and present for duty column: 15 officers and 20 EM. Moreau’s frustration ceased: he could cut orders!

 

19 September, another real acquisition: a graduate of 25 missions as pilot in the 91st, our new assistant Operations Officer: Captain (“The Chink”) Chima, III. As long and handsome as his name, a fearful slayer of and for female alike, you never thought of Chinkie as a Headquarters Joe. But he managed it.

 

On 22 September, joy came to the enlisted section. With our new T/O, full of stripes and rockers, it became possible to reward the diligent. Sgt. Brown became Staff Sergeant, Pfc. Gillett and Pvts. Hugh and Hoffman became Corporals, Pvt. Jacques, a faithful purveyor to the comfort of the lads in House 78, a Private First Class on a par with the immortal Greengroin.

 

THE RABBITS’ WEST:     Parenthetically, House 78 deserves more than passing mention. Yes, we lived in style. The Boss and Tiger and Smitty and Moreau and Hanes lived, as befitted their dignity, in Officers’ Mess No. 1, an elegant if slightly institutional ménage where one could eat, sleep and yes, even bathe under a single roof. The rest of the crowd lived across the campus in a nice house originally designed for light housekeeping by a Squadron Leader, his wife, servant, Austin car, seven children and three dogs. It had a parlor, dining room, kitchen, woodshed, garage, servant’s room, master bedroom, second bedroom, third bedroom, and fourth bedroom. Naturally, every room was used as a bedroom, even the kitchen, where Cpl. Eddie Barauskas, the Boss’s driver, slept warm next to the water boiler. The master bedroom was occupied by Yaussi and Kurtzie, the next by Haberman and Otstot, the next by Chima and the last and smallest by Clarkie. The living room and dining rooms were inhabited by Prior and the duty officers; Jacques lived in the servant’s bedroom.   We all had bicycles; these shared the garage with our winter firewood, kindly sent to us by Uncle Joe Nazzaro from Ridgewell.

 

The house was distinguished by its almost constant preoccupation with food. What with our nightly stint of Work usually lasting until 2 or 3 a.m., the inmates were constantly missing breakfast. This led to the constant use of “K” rations, with their coffee and bouillon and pork and veal loaf and pork and egg yolks. Sure they were good eaten raw out of the cans, but with a houseful of frustrated cooks, it was only a short time before we were making fearful and unheard of concoctions. Then came popcorn. An electric hot plate was obtained, butter and salt and sugar and cooking oil and lard and bread and fresh eggs (yes, eggs). Yaussi was head chef; for us the rule of Communisa applied: from each according to his ability; to each according to his appetite. Those who couldn’t cook washed dishes. Ah, happy days!

 

On 30 September another duty officer arrived, Lt. Donald J. Davis. Dave stayed with us only a short while then, he was transferred to the 305th Group at Chelveston.

 

The Great God Snafu lashed his tail at us in a big way on 25 October. Bear in mind, gentle reader, that we were strictly a headquarters outfit. As such, we had a total of four cars in moccission [on occasion], and never more. The Boss had a Studebaker sedan and we also had a couple of Wolsely “saloons”, as the British say, and a Command car. We had no heavy transport and had no need of any. Nevertheless on 25 October we received an assignment of 14 enlisted men from the 16th Replacement Control Depot, and twelve of them were truck drivers. Four Sergeants, four Corporals, five Pfc’s and one Private. Didn’t ask for them, need them or want them. But we got them just the same. The thing was soon straightened out and most of our truck drivers reassigned to Groups on 6 November.

 

The middle of November, two new Duty Officers were assigned to take the places of Herrmann and Davis. These were Lieutenants Paul Dreiling and Ralph (Rabbit) Villanova, both ex-combat guys, both welcome to our staff. We thought, until these two came, that we knew a thing or two about youthful exuberance, but we were wrong – and how! During the same period, S/Sgt. Livoti, who came to us from the 91st as Operations Clerk, was advanced to Tech., and the Boss’s room orderly, the faithful Pancho Valenzuela, was advanced from Buck Private to a prideful Pfc.

 

At this point, the members of the Wing had that nice, comfortable feeling of having jelled. Of course, in life, nothing is permanent and in the Army even less so. In our time, still less. However, we felt that this was the family. We belonged to the Combat Wing and we had the feeling that the Wing belonged to us. A look at our roster will show how we stood at this point in our career:

 

OFFICERS

 

C.O.                            :           Colonel William M. Gross, alias “Topdog” and “The Boss”

Exec.                           :           Lt. Col. Henry W. Terry, III, alias “The Tiger”

A-3                              :           Major Robert W. (Smitty) Smith, alias “The Mole”

Ass’t. A-3’s                 :           Capt. Cornelius (“The Chink”) Chima, III

Capt. William C. Melton

                                                1st Lt. Francis B. Clark, alias “Clarkie”

                                                1st Lt. William G. (Hutch) Hutchings

                                                2nd Lt. Paul B. Dreiling

                                                2nd Lt. Ralph A. Villanova, (“Rabbit”)

A-2                              :           Capt. Phillip W. Haberman, Jr., “Uncle Phil” alias “The Judge”

Ass’t. A-2 &

    Flak Officer                        :           Capt. Harold (Hal) J. Hanes

Wing Bombardier       :           Major Frank D. Yaussi, alias “Youse-Mouse”

Wing Navigator          :           Capt. Raymond Y. Kurtz, Jr., “Kurtzie”

Ass’t. Statistical

    Officer                    :           1st Lt. Roger A. Prior, alias “Roger the Lodger”

Adjutant                      :           Capt. Jules L. Moreau, known otherwise as “Julie”

Communications

    Officer                    :           Capt. Warren E. Dewlen

A-4 Transportation,

    Ass’t. Adjutant,

    Supply Officer &

    general Utilities

    man and fall guy     :           2nd Lt. Chester L. Otstot, alias “Cheddar” and “Hotshot”

ENLISTED MEN

 

T/Sgts.:            Herbert A. Williams, A-2 Section Chief

                        Frank A. Livoti, A-3 Section Chief

S/Sgts.:            William D. Brown, top kick

                        Knox E. Bibb

Sgts:                Maurice R. (“Moe”) Brunault

                        William H. Kirby

                        Robert C. Opp

                        Joe L. Schuetta

Cpls:                Edward W. Barauskas

                        George E. Biggs

                        Victor Bogart

                        Harry E. Chew

                        Darrell W. Gillett

                        Jesse D. Hays

                        Albert Hoffman

                        Robert L. Ibberson

                        William A. Kerns

                        John P. Ruth

                        Edwin C. Schultz

                        James R. Waldrop

                        William I. White, Jr.

Pfc’s:               George A. Hakeem

                        William H. Hurst

                        Robert H. Jacques

                        William P. Valenzuela

                        Calvin A. Sommer

                        Alvin M. Wright

Pvt’s:               Thomas Amadruto

                        John E. Armstrong

                        John F. Bellina

                        Alexander D. Bettencourt

                        Jack S. Bond

                        Ralph P. Germina, Jr.

                        Thomas I. Murphy

 

CIVILIANS

 

Miss Ella Prentice

 

FEMALES

 

Miss Ella Prentice

 

However, we knew it couldn’t last. Worthy personnel has a habit of gravitating upward, sooner or later, and we did have guys who had finished a tour of missions and would be entitled to go home sooner or later. We knew that General Armstrong, who was reputedly forming a new Group back in the States, was angling for ex-306ers, he having run that outfit during part of its career. We knew that we were to lose Yaussi when 1st Division cut orders assigning to us Major Hugh J. Toland, Group Bombardier of the 306th. Then shortly after that, they gave us 1st Lt. Martin T. Honke, Jr. of the 381st and that meant we were to lose our Navigator, old Kurtzie. Still, if we had to lose them, we couldn’t ask for better than Hugh and “Honky-Tonk”. And lose them we did, Yaussi at Christmas and Kurtzie right after the New Year.

           

Operations:      It has already been shown that it would be extremely hard to pick a particular date as the one on which Combat Wing became a functioning entity. However, there is no trouble in fixing the date of the beginning of our operational history: that date is fixed for us by the issuance of our first Combat Wing annex to an operational field order, which was in connection with a mission to St. Nazaire, 29 May 1943.

 

Perhaps we should explain this business of a Combat Wing Annex and how we prepared one. We had nothing to do with the selection of primary targets and not much to do with the planning of the route over enemy territory. In a typical case, Bomber Command would select tomorrow’s target shortly after the 4 o’clock weather conference. Sometimes, when the mission was uncomplicated, the major part of the planning would be left to 1st Division: in other cases, when the attacks of two or three Divisions had to be coordinated and fighter support fitted in, the Bomber Command field order would contain substantially all the data on the mission except the axis of attack and withdrawal and matters, which were of interest only to the individual divisions. In either case, the Division field order would come down to our Groups and to us by Teletype complete in substantially all the details of the planned attack, starting with the To: e. ½; ace and altitude of departure from the English Coast. What happened before and after was our concern. Division would tell us the size of the force our Combat Wing was required to supply; it was up to us to determine how many ships were to be put up by each Group and where each Group would fly: in the responsible lead position, the coveted high position or the dangerous low position. In paraphrase, Division would say to us, “Dear Combat Wing: Tomorrow we are going to attack Adolfshafen according to the enclosed plan. Please deliver to us at zero hour at 10,000 feet over Cromer sixty B-17 airplanes loaded with ten-500 lb. general-purpose bombs each and with the crews all briefed to carry out our plan. We agree to return to you any airplanes that don’t get shot down at Orfordness and zero plus 235. How you get them to Cromer and how you put them on the ground from Orfordness is your business. Your loving friend, 1st Division.”

 

Of course, if we didn’t like the plan of attack, it was our prerogative to squawk. We couldn’t object to the target, but sometimes we would kick about the route. We made it a point never to let an up-sun bombing run pass without complaining: we knew the boys wouldn’t be able, nine times out of ten, to see the target. But usually we had no squawk and it was only rarely that a squawk resulted in a change.

 

To make sure, however, that we approved or disliked the plan, we always laid the route out on our situation map and studied the target maps and photographs. We had some latitude in the matter of targets: if the field order didn’t specify aiming points, we would select them. This was often the case with the secondary and last resort target. In either case, we would do the selecting if it seemed appropriate. More usually, we would give the Groups two or three targets along the route that would make the trip profitable if the weather was bad at the assigned targets.

 

Assembly was the important thing. This was a constant struggle, although things certainly changed for the better as we went along. At first, the trouble was navigation and lack of good communication. To insure against failure to assemble, we gave our boys three bites at the apple. First, we made a pie-shaped initial assembly, with Groups coming in from three places and converging on a given point at a given time. Then, just in case they failed to make it there, we put a big dogleg in the route to the coast. This enabled any Group that was late to cut the corner and overtake the others. Then, for final insurance, we provided that if the Wing wasn’t assembled at the coast, the leader would circle until the others came up. This procedure kept our boys from aborting, while the others occasionally failed to assemble and hence couldn’t fight the war.

 

As we proceeded, however, our early troubles disappeared. Improved radio aids to navigation, our new VHF communications system and seasoning of personnel took care of them. But as we got into winter of 1943/44, old man weather took their place and then some. You couldn’t even fly a Combat Wing formation through a cloud; much less put one together if the planes couldn’t see each other. And assembly plan couldn’t be improvised in the air. So, when the field order came in, the first order of business was to get hold of Major Larry Atwell, the Station weatherman, and find out where the clouds would be. As a general rule, we made it a practice to assemble high: as far as the clouds were concerned, the old rule was right, “The higher, the fewer”. But we took all possible precautions, even to the extent of sending up a weather ship an hour or so before take-off, to report where the clouds actually were and help the formations to find a good spot.