This was the month when we began to smell victory in the air. We knew that the critical days of the Normandy invasion were over, because we started going back on our strategic targets in a big way. Of course, the tactical targets continued to crop up, as we knew they would until the end of the war. There were certain tactical jobs for which the heavy bombers of the strategic air force were ideally suited, such as the saturation of area from which the enemy had to be dislodged by bludgeon methods, where the rapier-like capabilities of the tactical forces were not the right weapon. True, we weren’t let in on the plans of the highest command, but the missions they handed us were a pretty good index of what the situation was on the ground. Strategic targets when the ground situation was static or proceeding according to plan; tactical targets when there was a critical situation on the ground, either to insure positions already gained or to start the ball rolling when it had stalled. That, at least, was the way it looked to us from our vantage point.

 

The fact, however, that the surface forces were cashing in on the air supremacy that our boys had created through two years of struggle and sacrifice did not serve to keep the month from having a decidedly routine flavor for us. There was plenty of satisfaction in watching the progress of the battle of France, in knowing that but for our labors in clearing the air none of it could have happened, but the perceptible effect on the kind or quantity of work we had was nil or nearly so. It was still a matter of staying up nights for our planning sessions, then crawling out of bed around noon to receive the reports of the mission that had been flown while we slept. We had an occasional critique, we followed our accustomed rounds of work and the sporadic search for pleasure. We needed that and yet for most of us it was no source of joy, merely an anodyne to dull the homesickness that jumped us when we weren’t looking. Still, we managed and our boys continued to say the United States a good and sufficiency in return for its investment in the shape of results accomplished.

 

The month opened with what was probably our major celebration of the war. On the night of the 1st, the Combat Wing threw its first, and so far only, wing ding. For a first party, it was a lulu. Credit goes to several leading spirits: to the Boss of supervision, to Moreau for organization, to Ace Akins for exercising his notable scrounging talents effectively in the search for potable refreshments, to the gals of the Red Cross, Henry our indispensable English butler for decorations and floral arrangements, and to the station GI band for furnishing music. For the occasion we appropriated the station movie, known under the influence of our surroundings as the local cinema. This room was designed to serve as a mess hall and the décor was of the type normally associated with sanitary facilities, i.e. glazed white tile and bare white walls. For our evening, it was transformed into a place of glamour by the artistic use of camouflage netting festooned with leafy garlands gathered from the countryside. It was no stand-up affair; not like the usual GI party where one spends an evening in the vertical position as long as the sense of balance continues to function. No, we had tables set in a crescent along one side of the room as though it were a nightclub and each table was graced by beautiful flowers arranged as only Henry can arrange them. Only the size of the party made all this possible. We kept it exclusive, inviting only the Group Commanders of our Wing, the Commanders of the other three Wings of the Division, and General Williams our Division Commander.

 

Being a special occasion, every member of the Wing invited the most attractive gal he knew, but the honors of the evening were carried off by none other than our own Miss Ella Prentice, who appeared in a seductive creation of black lace that knocked the assembled populace off its pins. Our own GI’s presided at the bar and to this day it remains a mystery how the guests managed to consume the quantity of liquor that was decanted during the course of the evening. Perish the thought that our impromptu bar ladies had anything to do with the disappearance.

 

The party was originally projected months before as a celebration of the Wing’s 100th mission, but we reckoned without the great number of missions flown in the months immediately preceding, so that by the time the blowout came and was brought to fruition, the 100th mission was long past and nearly forgotten. That, however, was a minor problem: the preceding month had been a sort of anniversary. It was the month after the month in which our first anniversary really happened. So we made that the excuse and it sufficed. Anyway, it was a glorious party. Some of us remembered and some of us had to take the word of others that it was and that made it unanimous. We were due for a stand down that night and General Williams saw to it that we got one. We made good use of it, gentle reader, good use.

 

Our Wing pioneered two tactical developments of note during the month. One was a “first” only for the Division, as it was previously in use by Combat Wings of the 2nd Division, although to our credit we may assert that the idea was stewing around in our heads before we knew about the 2nd Division. That was to paint our aircraft with distinctive Combat Wing markings, to facilitate recognition and eliminate confusion during assemblies and in deploying before the reassembling after bombing. Our devise was to cover the vertical and horizontal fixed empennage and the wing tips of our Forts with bright red paint. We painted one ship experimentally and went up and looked at it. The results were unmistakable, especially on the newer ships without camouflage. So we painted them all and it developed to be a big help to our operations. The other Combat Wings of the Division saw our ships in the air and promptly paid us the compliment of putting distinctive markings on their own ships.

 

The other new departure was wholly original with us. As we write this, we are firmly convinced that it will make a big difference during the coming winter, if by that time Jerry still thinks he can take it and forces us to continue dishing it out. We were looking forward to the season of bad weather, when we could fly our missions without seeing the ground at all. In that period, everything would depend on the efficiency of our so-called Mickey equipment and the Mickey navigators without whom we could not bomb effectively through cloud.

 

The Mickey business had just about reached its stage of ultimate development. To trace it from the beginning; at first, when H2S, otherwise known as “Stinky”, first came to our Theatre, all radar bombing equipment was based at Alconbury, where the 482nd Group maintained Stinky aircraft for the whole Eighth Air Force. (Mickey was a later and improved version of Stinky.) Alconbury was a necessary evil from the start; our Mickey ships had to be on a single base because there were so very few of them and trained maintenance personnel were inadequate to man more than a single station.

 

Then, as the number of men and ships increased, it became possible for each Combat Wing to have its own Mickey ships and crews and to assign one Squadron in each Wing to act as a full-time Mickey outfit for the whole Wing. That was a big improvement, but it didn’t fill the bill entirely for two reasons. First, it was still necessary to dispatch Mickey ships to other fields the night before a mission and that robbed the boys of their badly needed sleep. It made them less receptive to briefing and it meant that they would fly their missions in a state of very undesirable fatigue. (There was one occasion when a Mickey Pilot who had been hard-pressed for several days, slept in the cockpit all the way to Berlin!) So the Division authorized us to break up the specialist Mickey Squadron, which in our case was the 324th of the 91st Group, and transfer the ships and crews to our three stations. This was a big step forward, because it meant that the boys could sleep until just before briefing, just like the other crews. Also, it meant that a Mickey Pilot would always be flying in the lead of an outfit that he belonged to, whose habits and tricks he knew – an outfit that he knew how to fly with and that he knew how to make fly with him, and that meant plenty.

 

However, it became apparent to us that the new arrangement carried with it certain implications. We tried never to lose sight of the fact that the Boss, as Wing Commander, had been given a definite mission; he was charged with responsibility for the tactical efficiency of his Wing. As long as there was just a single Mickey Squadron that responsibility could be discharged by seeing to it that there was a competent and responsible officer in command of that squadron and then holding him for the results. But when the Mickey function was dispersed among the three Groups, the supervising responsibility could no longer be delegated. There was Mickey training, Mickey maintenance, special briefing and interrogation. The Mickey operators of the various Groups had to pool their experience. There would inevitably be occasions when the Mickey ships of one Group would be out of commission and ships in commission would have to be traded back and forth. There would be responsibilities for maintaining a Mickey trainer machine for the Wing and seeing to it that a program for using it was put into effect and coordinated with maximum benefit between the various Groups. The conclusions were obvious, even though nobody had reached them. There had to be a Mickey Officer on the General’s Staff. So we conferred with Lt. Col. Dick Weitzenfeld, the Commander of the 324th, and he gave us Captain Hillard C. Alloway, one of the most experienced of Mickey navigators. With our new setup, with the advantage of dispersal of ships and crews and at the same time, centralized supervision and coordination of effort, we thought we had the ideal arrangement at least for the present. We wrote a letter to the Division about it.

 

There were also developments in our fleet of private airplanes: not the big, rough B-17s that were so unpopular in Germany, but the nice little airplanes that the Wing Staff used for hops to Ridgewell and Nuthampstead and Sh! an occasional flip up to Scotland. Initially, we had a Cub (L-4B) to the Army, and an Airspeed Oxford and an A-20, which last named airplane was the personal true love of Smitty the Mole. Well, the Oxford just sort of naturally wore out and one evil day, while returning from a mission without brakes a Fort ran smack and chewed off Smitty’s pet A-20, while Smitty was home on furlough in the good old U.S.A. (There really is such a place , you know.) So, we got a new fleet: a Cessna and a P-47 Thunderbolt for our local hot pilots to work off their steam with. And, for the first time, the Boss had an airplane of his own; one that he could fly without humbly craving the by-your-leave of his operations staff. It was a Norden Norseman, one of those Canadian-built parasol jobs that they use in the frozen wilds of the north instead of dog teams and Robert W. Service. The General was deeply conscious of the great generosity of the Ops. crowd in letting him have his own airplane. Nice of them, he said.

 

Operationally, the month showed a fall in volume of business. We flew “only” eighteen missions. Eleven of these were strategic. We attacked Leipzig on the 9th, the experimental station at Peenemunde on the Baltic on the 18th, Leipzig and Dessau on the 20th, Schweinfurt on the 21st, the huge synthetic oil works at Merseburg on the 28th, again on the 29th, and an aero engine works at Munich on the 31st. The quality of these attacks was, on the whole, excellent. On the 11th, 12th, 13th and 16th there was cloud over the Continent and we made four heavy PFF attacks on Munich with first-rate results and a good deal of important industrial damage. PFF was paying off.

 

On the 6th, 8th, and 9th, we attacked Noball targets so called, that is: flying-bomb launching sites in the Pas de Calais area. The entire Division benefited from a Noball Master Map devised by our G-2 section, which served as a complete index and guide to all the un-coordinated target material, which had been accumulated for more than a year. But the days of attacks on targets of this type were numbered, for several reasons. For one, the buzz bombs, while unpleasant for London, were not an important military factor in the war. Another, there were fewer sites to worry about, because the ones in the Cherbourg area had been taken by our ground forces. Lastly, the ground and air defenses of the British proved to be surprisingly effective, so that it was worthwhile to divert our striking force from its proper and more important tasks.

 

There were also tactical missions. On the 4th, we attacked bridges over the Loire at Tours, as part of the program to continue isolating the Normandy battlefront from the rest of France. On the 24th and 25th, we played our part in what was undoubtedly one of the decisive battles of this war when we along with the rest of the Eighth Air Force plastered the German concentrated in the area south and west of St. Lo, leading to the great break through at Avaranches, the swift occupation of Brittany, and the breath-taking swing to the south and east by General Patton’s armored forces, which resulted in the encirclement of the German 7th Army and the winning of the first phase of the battle of France.

 

During the month, we were credited with 1,787 sorties, which was a respectable figure. We had only 22 aircraft returning early, or 1.2%, and in that department we led the Division for the fifth successive month. Our losses were 27 aircraft, or 1.5% of those entering enemy territory. We were credited with nine enemy aircraft destroyed, five probables and 16 damaged. It wasn’t up to some of our previous months, but still it was, as the British say, “not ‘arf bad”. The U.S.A. was still getting its money’s worth out of the old Foist and Woist.

 

There were some personnel changes during the month, as always. Major Smith, alias Major the Right Honorable Sir Sterling C. Mole (the ‘C’ was for character), was still in the states on furlough, and we followed his route through work and word received from our wives, whom he telephoned at various stages of his hegira. On the 2nd, Capt. John W. Brunning came to us after finishing his missions at Ridgewell to act as assistant Wing Navigator. On the 10th, we opened a Wing Weather Bureau, with 1st Lt. Leslie E. Jones of the 18th Weather Squadron, formerly attached to the 91st Group, assigned to the position of Private Weather Prognosticator. On the 14th, it became officially known that Colonel Claude E. Putman, Jr., permanent commander of the 91st and our genial host, who had gone home with Smitty, had become Commanding Officer of a B-29 Wing in the states and would not return. The loss of Terry, in consequence, became permanent and official, as he assumed permanent command of the 91st on that date. We didn’t really lose him; he merely graduated from our little coterie of station guests to become our host. We were all pretty proud of him.

 

On the 18th word came that Chima, our own Cornelius the Chink, had been promoted to Major. Rejoicings were in due and proper form. And on the 18th we acquired a new stalwart: Captain Robert E. Sheriff, who came to us after a tour with the 91st as an assistant Operations Officer.

 

For the first time, a monthly installment of our History requires two new departments: a Sports Column and a Society Column. Under the first heading, it is incumbent on us to report that during the month we instituted a physical fitness hour, daily at 16:30 hrs., when all and sundry repaired to the athletic field for a game of volleyball or softball, as the case might be. We met and defeated the 91st Group in softball, but found ourselves outclassed by them in volleyball. In the intramural struggle between our officers and our GI’s the GI’s had the edge in softball, but were polished by the officers in volleyball. It was good fun and good for us – chair-born troops that we were.

 

The Society Column records with pleasure the marriage of Colonel Terry to Miss Hazel Boston of Norwich, which took place at St. John’s Church in Norwich on the afternoon of the 20th. The Tiger had met his future bride in his early days at Thurleigh when he and the other stalwarts of the 306th Group were in the pleasant habit of repairing evenings to the Falcon, a pub of note at Bletsoe, not very far from Bedford. The Falcon was no ordinary pub; it is celebrated both locally and elsewhere as the wayside inn where Edward Fitzgerald found solitude while composing the verses of the Rubaiyat of Omar the Tentmaker, and it was presided over by the genial owner, Mrs. Dickson, who ran the place mostly for her own pleasure and always closed it to the public when friends were around. In these idyllic surroundings, Terry met Hazel, who was Mrs. Dickson’s niece, and their romance bloomed.

 

When it came to a showdown, the Wing stood up for old Terry. Hugo Toland was the handsome best man, playing opposite Hazel’s sister, June, who made a lovely bridesmaid. The General headed the Wing delegation, which included Miss Prentice, Chima, and Haberman. After an impressive if inaudible ceremony at the church, a lawn party was held a the home of the bride’s parents, where all made merry and the Boss, after the English custom and a little coaxing, made a speech. The weather man put on his best show for the occasion. It was a lovely event, enjoyed by all.