August, a month of fateful decisions on the ground when the forces under the command of General Eisenhower, known to the British press as “Montgomery’s right flank”, encircled and assassinated the German 7th Army in the Calais pocket, was just another month of slogging and working to the units of the Eighth Air Force, including us. Days and missions went by in their usual procession while our excited interest and our hopes were wrapped up in startling events, which transpired in France: the landings on the Mediterranean coast, the rest of the Germans, the liberation of Paris, the end of London’s ordeal with the liberation of the Pas de Calais buzz bomb coast and the amusing progress of General Patton’s armored columns through the heart of northern France. Daily we awaited the arrival of the tactical bomb line by Teletype from higher headquarters: with absorbed interest we stood around while the G-2s outlined the new area of operations on their big map in the Intelligence office.

 

Perhaps the high point of the month was the General’s excursion to France. This took place on the 12th of the month, only a few days after the American had broken out of their Normandy beachhead in the Avaranches area, swept like wildfire the length of the Brest Peninsula, reached the Loire in the vicinity of Nantes and started eastward swing, which was to turn north in a few days and accomplish the entrapment of the German armies. But these things were not generally understood at the time of our expedition. We went over to see a beachhead and the beachhead was what we saw.

 

The Boss did a rather nifty piece of organizing. Some had rank, some were good mixers. A combination of both, in this man’s army, is a useful mixture; in this instance, it enabled the Boss to borrow from some friends a C-47, complete with crew and everything. So, on the morning of the 12th, much too early to be bright, the lucky few assembled and we piled into the waiting transport, taking with us the pride and joy of the 91st Group: a sports model jeep all dolled up with chromium and white side wall tires. The party included General Gross, General Beeman (Chief of Staff of the Division), Colonels Terry and Berry of the 91st , Colonels Hall and Reed of the 381st, and Smitty, Chima, and Haberman of the Wing staff. Colonel Hunter of the 398th, who was permitted to bring one guest, held a war bond contest and brought a lucky corporal instead of a member of his staff.

 

We took off in poor-ish weather at seven in the morning. Weather continued poor over England, but when we hit the Channel it cleared, and by the time we picked up the French coast it was beautiful, fresh and balmy. At about eight o’clock, we swung in at low altitude over the Points de Barfleur, the eastern tip of the Cherbourg peninsula, skirted the coast as we flew south. The shore presented a unique spectacle: we plainly saw the remains of the beach obstacles, the scars and pockmarks of the battle that had raged across the land only a week or so earlier, the multitude of ships lying offshore, the myriad of ducks lying next to the ships, taking cargo, paddling away, waddling up the beaches and onto the roads, and so into the fields where stores of equipment were being piled up in improvised depots. Then, crossing the estuary of the Vire with its mud flats and winding tidal creeks, we struck inland and toward the east until we picked up and sat down on our briefed destination, which was the newly-built landing strip known as T-2, located near Collerville, just southwest of Port-en-Bessin, which was roughly the geographical center of the beachhead. Our landing was made at 8:20 in the morning.

 

Parenthetically, there was none of us who was unimpressed by the startling demonstration of air supremacy we had just been given. Not merely that we had flown in an unarmed, unescorted transport plane through an area where history was being made to within five miles of the frontline fighting, with as little concern as though it were a routine flight from New York to Philadelphia, but at the thought of what we could have accomplished over the beachhead area had we been a hostile airplane. We thought of our experience when the story came through a week or so later about the captured German officer who demanded fighter escort before being sent from France to England in a transport. Clearly, you could do things in a C-47 that you couldn’t do in a Ju-52. For there was nothing unusual about what we had done: unarmed, unescorted transports were flying routinely in and out of the beachhead in broad daylight every day of the week with nothing more than an ordinary flying control clearance, bringing supplies, ferrying wounded and performing a thousand other unglamorous work-a-day jobs, as though Goering’s Luftwaffe had ceased to exist. We took pride in that, for we knew that it was the Eighth Air Force that had brought this state of affairs into being.

 

After landing, we unloaded our jeep. It is a nice thing in your travels to have two Generals in the party. Generals are convenient things to have around: you don’t have to carry your own things because you can pretty well borrow what you need when you need it. One jeep was not enough to carry our party, so we pulled our Generals on the flight-strip commander and before long we had two more jeeps and drivers. We proposed to do the beachhead in style.

 

We took off. We thought we would have traffic trouble along the route, but no.  The organization of traffic in the beachhead was breath-taking. The old two lane highways of what had been a peaceful countryside were obviously inadequate to the vast quantities of traffic pouring across the beaches, so the engineers had dispensed with their need, driving brand-new four-lane roads inland from the beaches wherever needed. Amazing things: these modern armies, building their own facilities wherever they go, counting not at all on existing facilities that could be destroyed by the enemy in his retreat. The air strips were another thing of the same kind; also, the six-inch pipeline that followed our troops and air units wherever they went to bring oil and gasoline, which are the life-blood of modern armies. We saw these things and we marveled.

 

Our travels took us first to the beach at Port-en-Bessin. Offshore were countless ships discharging their cargoes in sub-line disregarding the lack of port facilities. Heading inland along the roads newly built was an endless stream of tanks, mobile weapons, trucks and ducks. Overhead were innumerable kite balloons, tied own with steel gadgets simply stuck in the ground. It seemed that every few hundred feet you passed a new airstrip packed with airplanes of all kinds, and in-between were fields, which had been turned into depots where acres and acres of stores of all kinds were lying out in the sun, stacked ten and twenty feet high, uncamouflaged, begging for air attack. There was rather less battle evidence here than we had expected. Every so often you passed a chimney or a fragment of a wall that testified to a house, which had stayed in one place too long. We carried along the road that paralleled the beach until we came to the spot not far from Avaranches that our own boys had bombed on D-Day just ahead of the first assault wave.

 

Here we dismounted. As we went down to the beach there was an unexpected salute: they were dynamiting hulks. Colonel Hunter’s GI guest promptly hit the nearest ditch. The dust he collected didn’t differentiate him from the rest, who by that time were clawing dust out of their eyes, ears, noses, and mouths and not worrying about the inch-thick layer that covered our clothes. For the yellow dust was the all-pervading characteristic of the entire beachhead. Every vehicle that moved raised an enormous cloud of dirty, yellow-gray, choking powder and there were plenty of vehicles. Only part settled; the rest remained airborne and accumulated until the landscape was obscured and the sun was, at times, invisible, at best a dull, coppery plate apparently unconnected with the illumination of the scene below. There were plenty of times when the visibility was so low that we had to go into low gear; at times we had to stop entirely until the dust cleared somewhat.

 

Where we dismounted there was plenty to show where Hitler’s Atlantic wall had stood. What a formidable thing it had been before we attacked. Remains of underwater obstacles showed above the low tide. Facing the beach just inside the high-water marks was a rampart of reinforcement concrete some eight feet thick, studded with spikes as thick as railroad tracks garnished with miles of wicked-looking wire. At intervals, the beach was covered by the embrasures of massive concrete forts and pill-boxes set in the rampart. Yet these things had been ridiculously neutralized. The fortifications were split like eggshells and the openings as wide as roads had been driven through the rampart wherever needed. Through these gaps, the engineers had built concrete ramps furnishing ready access to the beach. Steel boxes braced together had been floated across the Channel and sunk in place, running out from the shore a half-mile or more, and these served as breakwaters to implement the transition of ducks from the water to the land.

 

Continuing, we followed the shore road to Coursoulles, near the end of the British east end of the beachhead. Then inland in the direction of Caen. Here there was no doubt that a battle had taken place. The nearer we got to Caen, the greater the devastation of the countryside. Caen itself was the peak of the crescendo. Here the Germans had been literally blasted out of places by a series of massive droppings of thousands of tons of high explosives by the RAF and by massed artillery bombardment. To see Caen was to understand for the first time that this is the war of high explosives. The devastation and desolation of what had been a thriving, prosperous city boggled description and then went on to boggle whatever faculties we had left. A few parts were relatively untouched, but for the most part there were only heaps of rubble and skeletons of buildings. A building in Caen meant a thing one-third of which lay in the road and the other two-thirds in its own basement. The streets were hardly recognizable as such: you drove through lanes, which the bulldozers had cleared through the rubble heaps. You could not sympathize with destruction so complete: there was no chord in your own experience that things like this could touch. It lacked reality; you could see it, but you couldn’t feel it.

 

After journeying through the devastated portion of the city, we came to one of the outskirts where only isolated incidents of damage had occurred. We stopped in a little estaminet for a drink. The barmaid was glad to see us, but she had little to offer. Supplies had been cut off since bombing. Obligingly, she made a sweet concoction out of raspberry syrup and water. At least it was wet. Those of us who had a little French made conversation. We tried to commiserate. You have had a bad time here, we said. “Oui”, she answered, “Mais ca c’est fini maitenant”-. “Yes, but it’s all over now; good times are here again. Proudly they exhibited a new baby just before the invasion apparently in the best of health. In the estaminet, we were amused by a poster plastered on the wall by the local German Kommandantur. “ACHTUNG”, it said, “All persons are warned as follows: 1. It is strengst verboten to rent rooms to German soldiers not holding a billeting order from the Regimental authority. 2. It is also verboten to rent rooms to French civilians for the use of German soldiers. 3. Any persons violating this order will be tried by court-martial on charges of promoting debauchery in the German armed forces”.

 

Once more we took off, this time down the straight road from Caen to Bayeaux. Here the British had driven south to capture our old friend, the Caen/Carpiquet airfield. This country was not badly chewed up, apparently because it was open, unbroken land ideally suited to tank warfare. Chief evidence of the battle that had passed was the large number of Jerry tanks, busted and abandoned, with their guns drooping in true Freudian symbolism. Everyone in the party was struck by this point. Bayeaux, with its beautiful tracery cathedral, was entirely unharmed, and the country around it was still smiling. We didn’t stop to see the famous tapestry, which Jerry the art-lover had taken with him in his flight.

 

Finally we returned to Colleville. We were advised not to buck the southbound traffic between there and Cherbourg, so we piled into our C-47 and took off for Cherbourg/Querqueville airdrome, in its day another prominent member of our targets list. Jerry had done a good job of spoiling here, but the engineers did a better one and we landed on a perfect landing ground, which had been completed only that morning. Once more we pulled our Generals and were provided with a weapons carrier and a command car to take us into Cherbourg. A Red Cross Club was open there and we had doughnuts and coffee, which by that time we needed rather badly. Then we took in the port. It was really all beat up. Where the care maritime had stood, there was a pile of rubble thirty to forty feet deep. This was not bombing, but good old Jerry demolition, carried out when he knew he would lose the port. But in spite of the spoiling of the port facilities, the harbor was chockfull of vessels of all kinds and the stream of traffic leaving for the south was endless. It was good to see railroad rolling stock working for us with the words, “Deutache Reichsbahn” on the side. But the Jerry stuff looked pretty speedy compared with the shiny new trains and diesel engines bearing the words “Corps of Transportation U.S. Army”.

 

After three hours of wandering around, we finally went back to Querqueville, where we saw a big British battleship lying offshore and lazily letting off a salvo every minute or so. A few days later we read in the Teletype poop that it was the Rodney, bombarding a troublesome coastal battery on the Island of Alderney. The Navy lads took a lot of credit for jobs of that kind, and it was useful work, but we know that without the air force, the Rodney wouldn’t have dared to sit there at all. Finally, we loaded on our C-47 and were back at Bassingbourn for a shower and supper, tired but happy and feeling most educated. It was a great day for the ones who were lucky enough to go.

 

We had some personnel incidents during the month. On the 1st, having lost Terry for good, we were given Lt. Col. Ross Milton of the 91st as our Exec. He was an old friend; first at Polebrook when we had the 351st in the Wing, then as a Deputy Group Commander of the 91st. But we got him on paper only for the time being, for on the 2nd he took off for a well earned 30-day furlough home. On the 2nd, Smitty the Mole completed the last leg of his trek to California and back and rejoined the ranks. On the 16th Hugo Toland, our Bombing Officer, left us for good to go home for reassignment, his place being taken by Capt. William E. Sticklen of the 91st, just returned from a 30-day stretch in that far-off land called the United States. On the same day we also lost our chief duty officer, 1st Lt. Francis B. Clark. Clarkie got in on a go-home deal, which called for officers to terminate government contracts. Being a lawyer by trade, it was right down Clarkie’s alley. We were plenty sorry to lose Hugo and Clarkie, two of our best. On the 27th, we were given the assignment of 1st Lt. Elmer C. Laedtke of the 91st, who had come to us about a month earlier on DS from the 91st to act as an assistant Operations Officer.

 

We had one pleasant surprise toward the end of the month. Our old friend, Lt. Col. J.W. Wilson, who was our Wing Exec. for a day during the summer of 1943 as previously recorded in these columns, returned to the ETO in search of a job. He was certain to find one: after all, he was one of the earliest early worms in the Theater, but jobs worthy of his talent and experience didn’t come open every day. Pending a permanent post, he came to live with us here at Bassingbourn and we were mighty glad to have him.

 

Operationally, we slogged ahead, now hitting tactical targets in support of ground operations and now going after our reliable strategic ones. Our tactical missions came only in the first half of the month, while we were aiding the conditions that enabled the ground forces to make their amazing advance that carried them from the Normandy beachhead to the French and Belgian frontier in the course of a few weeks. We began to understand more fully that we operated mainly when the enemy situation needed loosening; when the loosening had been completed and there was a fluid situation on the ground, which the ground and tactical air forces could exploit, we were turned again to strategic bombing.

 

On the tactical side, we attacked Melun/Villaroche airdrome south of Paris on the 1st, transportation facilities at Saarbruken and Mulhouse on the 3rd, miscellaneous tactical objectives on the 7th and 8th and again on the 13th, enemy airfields at Versailles/Buc and Metz/Freseaty on the 12th and 14th respectively, and fixed defenses at Brest on the 11th.

 

Strategic targets were, to us, more interesting. On the 4th we hit Peenemunde on the Baltic, where Jerry had his huge experimental station that had spawned the V-1 projectile, or the “buzz bomb”, and was hard at work on his so-called V-2, reputed to be a long-range rocket packing ten tons of high explosive in the nose. Our aiming points, which we hit, were two large buildings where he was manufacturing hydrogen peroxide, which was supposed to be a propellant for the rocket. On the 8th, we continued the attack on his oil situation when we went for oil storage depots at Neinburg and Dollbergen in the Hanover area. With the fall of Ploesti to the Russians then only a short time ahead, those oil attacks loomed ever larger in their strategic importance to us – and to the Hun.

 

On the 9th, we were briefed for an attack on one of the lucky targets: one of those few targets that somehow seemed to bear a charmed life. This was the BMW Aero Engine works at Allach, near Munich. It had been repeatedly attacked, but had only sustained minor damage. This time its luck held good again, for the weather was so bad that our boys were unable to penetrate. Instead, they dropped on Saarbruken again and on a German military camp at Kleenborn in Belgium, near the German border.

 

Cologne/Cathein airfield was our target for the 15th. Here Jerry had built up some of his dwindling reserves of fighter planes, thinking that the formidable flak defenses of Cologne would keep us away and save his planes from the fate that was rapidly overtaking them elsewhere. He was wrong, for we made a concentrated attack with first-rate results; and the flak deterred us not at all. Then, on the 16th we carried the fight against the GAF forward again with successful attacks on the Siebel aircraft works at Nelle and the GAF airdrome at nearby Delitzach.

 

At this point, just as we were heading for a new record with 14 missions already flown in 16 days, ol’ man weather took a hand and we were grounded for eight consecutive days. This was a bore and a nuisance, for we were in our stride and every day we lost was, we feared, a week gained for Jerry. Then, on the 24th things opened up again and we finished the month in a burst of activity, attacking the V-2 rocket factory at Woimar/Buchenwald and the airfield at Kolleda on the 24th, Newbrandenburg airfield north of Berlin on the 25th, synthetic oil plants at Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr on the 26th, and an aircraft assembly plant at Berlin/Schonefeld on the 27th. Finally on the 30th, we polished off the month with an outstandingly successful Pathfinder attack through cloud on the Krupp Germania works at Kiel.

 

It should be recorded that although it wasn’t our show the last Noball mission was flown on the 30th by aircraft of the 2nd Division. “Noball”, gentle reader, was the cryptic name for attacks on the buzz bomb launching sites on the French coast. We had been there again and again. Now, with the tide of battle swinging north to encompass the buzz bomb nest in the Pas de Calais sector, London’s ordeal of sudden death and destruction was drawing rapidly to a close. A night or two later just before dawn, as the narrator of these pages was returning to his own couch after a night of work and briefing lo! a sure enough buzz bomb flew impertinently over Bassingbourn and drove your narrator to the vicinity of the shelters and conked out just beyond our establishment. Your savior who had kept away from London for months because his wife was frightened (he speaketh not of himself) promptly decided that London was safer than Bassingbourn and took off on pass. The few buzz bombs that still came over were being air-launched by HE-111s. There was no telling where these things would light.