HISTORY OF 381st BOMB GROUP
1 June 1945 to Inactivation
CONCLUSION
TWO years of life in rural England ended as suddenly as they had begun. Ridgewell celebrated VE Day as a beer holiday 6 May 1945, as has been noted elsewhere, and it was less that a week from that time that Group Commander Conway S. Hall, with Lt Col George G. Shackley and all squadron heads, was summoned to a special meeting at Brampton, First Air Division's HQ.
When they returned to base, the outfit as one took to pen, pencil, typewriter, to inform their wives, families and friends Stateside that the long-awaited end finally materialized; 1,875 troops of the 381st were coming home.
It came as a refreshing stimulus after many days of waiting since the last of 297 missions, late in April, and despite its anti-climactic position relative to the cessation of hostilities.
The word which Col Hall and his officers brought back with them from Brampton did not become official until the next day, 13 May, when the group received its orders. It was not until then that maintenance crews began flooring their Fortress bomb bays to receive baggage; that material men and squadron supply sergeants began checking equipment lists and readying crates and shipping tickets, and that the whole field began discussing possible dates and manner of shipment.
Early there was the rumor that every available plane, excepting those needed to transfer to outfits going to occupational assignments, would be flown over the ATC's northern route. These reports proved well founded, although at first squadron commanders understood the word "passengers" to denote volunteers from the ground echelon who might be afforded space on home-run aircraft with their regular combat crews.
By mid-day, however, the final arrangement called for the outright assignment of ten passengers for each plane, with a total of 72 Fortresses and their crews scheduled to make the hop. Those aircraft included several transferred in to us from other First Division group for the purpose of ferrying to the ATC terminus and Bradley Field, Windsor Locks, Connecticut.
BOMBERS LEAVE RIDGEWELL
On 20 May, within a week of the alert order's reception, 11 bombers of the 532nd and 533rd took off for home, authorized by the group's air-and-sea movement orders contained in Letter AG 370.50 OpGC, HQ, ETOUSA, APO 887, 13 May 1945, Subject Movement Orders Shipment 10043; later amended to 19 May 1945.
Dispatching problems at various divisional stations, deriving largely from unfavorable weather conditions over the northern air route and resulting in a great stack-up of aircraft at Valley, North Wales, and at Meeks Field, Iceland, causing a delay between the dispatch of the first 11 planes and that of the 61 that followed them 7 June. The first crews and their passengers, a total of 220 men, had little time to cut the luggage weight to the allowable 55 pounds (plus or minus additional pounds per man for the special flying gear of airmen) and had no time at all to say good-bye to the people of Ridgewell and Great Yeldham before they were homeward bound.
From 20 May to late on the morning of 7 June, 1,215 men did virtually nothing but sleep and eat. Each day promised departure, and each day, for more than two long anxious weeks, brought its disappointment. The base movie was jammed from opening time at 14.00 hrs each day, straight through to the 23.00 hrs let-out from the final evening performance.
The ARC Aeroclub, already stripped down to a games room and the barest sort of snack bar, finally discontinued operation of the latter nearly a week before the larger contingent was airborne. There was literally nothing with which to occupy the time of most of the men, and waiting, in the face of a sudden homecoming so long anticipated, was keenly irksome.
Prior to the departure of the second flight, a holding party consisting of five officers and some 60 enlisted men from the Bomb and Service Groups, was chosen to oversee base maintenance until its final disposition had been decided upon. In this party was 1st Lt George E. Kessel, 535th Equipment Officer, one of the many officers and men of the group who had married English girls during their two years abroad.
MAJOR WILCOX HEADS SEABORNE UNIT
When the 61 planes of the second unit left the field on the sunny afternoon of 7 June with Col Hall at their head, there remained, exclusive of the intended holding force, 695 officers and men under the command of Major Leroy C. Wilcox, newly appointed ground executive officer. This remainder completed the packing and shipment to Scotland for hold loading of the group's TAT equipment earmarked for use in the States.
The materiel included, among other things, those capacious helmets which had done duty not as armor but wash basins in latrines and barracks. Also packed were all carbines and gas-masks, neither of which articles had seen more than practice service in two years.
Refueling units, mobile oilers, cletracs and other heavy line machinery was shipped to a nearby depot, there to be re-issued to occupational units needing such replacement equipment. All records of confidential or lower classification and all office supplies and equipment, library material, excess clothing, and field issue, kitchen and mess hall items, and the one thousand and one items required to make a bomb group's housekeeping possible at home or abroad, came to the States TAT.
Already the air travellers of both bomber contingents were nearly two weeks into their 30 days of "Rest and Recuperation". Which the exception of two aircraft which developed engine trouble but came through after a day or two's delay, every pilot made the long, over-water haul via Wales, Iceland and Labrador, in under 24 flying hours.
The 381st had the good fortune to accomplish the entire air phase of the movement without a casualty, although one bomber made an emergency landing in Greenland, where an engine was temporarily doctored to permit its pilot to return to Iceland. There, after miraculously coming through a crash-landing in one peace when the undercarriage collapsed during the landing, the crew idled for three days while Meeks Field hangar crews returned the bomber to A-1 flying shape again.
AIR CONTINGENT'S JOURNEY
For the great majority who flew home, though, the trip was a thorough going success, despite the crowding attendant upon cramming 20 men, their gear, and considerable special equipment, into each narrow bomber. And every officer and man had only the highest praise for the efficiency and consideration with which they were handled by the military and civilian personnel of ATC. This great organization scheduled and routed every bomber over the course which included landings at Valley, North Wales; Meeks Field, Iceland; Goose Bay, Labrador; and Grenier and Bradley Fields, USA.
Emphasis at every station was placed upon messing and billeting the transients. Red tape simply did not exist, and only pilots, navigators and radio operators were subject to the most elementary briefings on the course and procedures ahead, immediately following landing at each base.
At Valley, a sandspit exposed to the salt breezes of Caernarvon Bay, the commanding officer insisted upon Class A uniform for all transients leaving the flight line. Inasmuch as one could hardly eat, sleep or attend the normal natural functions in a bomber crammed with 20 other similarly motivated, it was necessary for all but a few far-sighted characters to rip duffel and B-$ bags out of the bomb bays, extract wrinkled blouses and trousers, and go parading into mess halls, movies and barracks looking anything but the smart soldiery undoubtedly envisioned by the commander who issued, and personally assisted in enforcing, the order.
Crews stayed overnight at Valley, then took off for Labrador early the next morning. Meeks Field proved to be an unreleivedly flat wasteland composed mainly of ancient volcanic stones and Nissen huts banked high with earth and rocks against what the permanent party claimed were winters so severe, planes and personnel were absolutely immobilized for weeks at a time when fog, snow and ice gripped the base.
But there was hot water in the wash houses, and there were sheets on the beds. After more than five hours of flying the travellers badly needed both.
In addition the ARC girls offered free coffee and doughnuts in a hut which also provided reading, writing and lounging facilities. Trucks met every incoming plane and fast-working refueling and maintenance crews checked straight down the line until all aircraft were pronounced ready for take-off.
Station time at Meeks Field came late the same night, with pilots taking their craft on ACFE towards Labrador, 10 hours away across the North Atlantic. The sun merely dipped below the horizon for a few hours during that leg of the journey, and both "Kiwis" and combat men marvelled at the rugged grandeur of the Greenland peaks, ice-clad and forbidding their broad bases lost in the inpenetrable gloom, as the southern tip of the great island swept slowly beneath them.
At Goose bay, wryly dubbed by its personnel as "Heaven in the North", and which proved a clean, rather wonderful collection of army installations in a setting of sandy soil, slim straight pines and a glory of cloudless blue sky and golden sunshine, long low airport limousines met each bomber as it rolled into its alotted parking place. Briefing was prompt and the food at Goose excelled. Mess halls were operated 24 hours a day to accommodate transients. Bedding and bunks were ready for bodies badly pretzeled by ten hour attempts at couching on luggage and gear heaped in bomb bays and radio rooms.
STATESIDE
Bradley Field, Connecticut, should have been the next stop en route, but overcrowding there led to ATC dispatchers to assign most 381st aircraft to an overnight stay at Grenier Field, New Hampshire, some five hours flying south across New Brunswick, the Gaspe Peninsula and Maine.
Grenier offered the returnees their first chance to make that all-important phone call, and the Bell system's newly opened base telephone exchange was a seething, sweating pass of eager soldiers and beautifully patient and co-operative switchboard girls until far into the morning following the afternoon of arrival.
There was also fresh milk in abundance, and at the administrative building, where Red Cross and other volunteer ladies poured it, gallons were consumed by grown men who, quite apart from having seen nothing of the cow's nectar for months or even years, boasted stomachs thoroughly conditioned to the consumption of English ale and what the Army unblushingly called coffee. That milk, plus the sight of women smartly clad and made further attractive by fresh coiffures and sufficient make-up, told returnees at Grenier that they were very close to home.
AIR TRAVELERS PROCESSED
But where the military was concerned, the travelers might still have been in another world. The good, abundant, common-sense ATC management continued through Bradley Field, reached after a 90 minute flight from Grenier on the fifth day of flying. Here crews found the most amazing swift an efficient processing system.
First half-a-million dollars worth of bomber and equipment was disposed of via a simple exchange of signatures between the pilot and a coveralled, grease stained non-com. Then great roofed vans carried men and baggage to the initial processing shed.
Beginning with the attractive WAC sergeant, one of many enlisted women sprinkled through all departments with effective psychological "savoir", officers and men passed down clearly defined lanes and were checked for equipment. Everything one considered surplus could be surrended there. Then customs officials took signatures, leaving examinations at the simple interrogation level, and the possible possession of unauthorized items to the conscience of the soldier.
Quarters came next, and in each living area were tailor shops and well stocked PXs. Next day matters of physical check-ups, personnel records, and pay were equally swiftly and sensibly taken care off, and on their third day at Bradley, the 381st entrained for Camp Myles Standish, Massachusetts, there to be divided into regional groups for shipment to the nearest separation centers, coast to coast.
It was from the latter, generally in a matter of two days, that all were released for 30 days of "R&R" the first meaningful leaves of any significance since going overseas.
Thus was the air phase of the group's shipment handled for the average man. It was in every way a success. No man who came home via ATC's northern route could speak anything but praise for those who planned and executed the enterprise from start to finish.
RIDGEWELL TO GOUROCK
Homecoming for Major Wilcox's contingent proved to be the true completion of the overseas duty cycle begun two years before. Booked for passage on the Cunarder HMS Queen Elizabeth, which brought them to the British Isles late in May 1943, they rolled down to the railway station at Great Yeldham in trucks, starting on the morning of 20 June. The last of three trainloads were on their way north by two minutes past midnight on the morning of 21 June.
Most of the population of Ridgewell, Great and Little Yeldham and the surrounding villages lined the highways and jammed the platforms and tracks. They had come, and stayed until the last train's departure, to say their good-byes to men who had arrived as strangers and were leaving as friends. And in many cases husbands and sweethearts, after two years of close and amicable association.
The ARC clubmobile from Braintree, 16 miles west of the base, was on hand with its girls passing out the inevitable coffee and doughnuts.
In first class carriages, three soldiers to a compartment designed for six civilian passengers, the troops moved north west to Cambridge, then north through the Midlands, to Glasgow and finally Gourock, the tiny village on the Firth of Clyde where the outfit had originally landed.
Train and delay in transit lasted overnight, and on 22 June the outfit boarded the Queen Elizabeth, from whose decks they spent two days watching thousands more loaded from ferry-sized lighters which plied the harbor past allied warcraft, fishing trawlers and squat, dirty colliers, from the docks to the mammoth liner.
On 24 June the ship slipped down the Clyde past villages and dwellings where men and women, waving sheets, flags and anything else sufficiently large and bright, added their send-off to this first great homecoming boatload of the Eighth Air Force men and women who had been America's spearhead into the Reich.
LIFE AFLOAT
Early in the afternoon of 29 June, four days later, the grayclad behemoth warped into Pier 91, North River, New York City. The voyage's length was necessitated by hard weather towards the end of the journey, to avoid the worst of which the Elizabeth's skipper took his ship many miles off course. The result was equivalent, in time consumed, to that spent zig-zagging alone two years before, when possible lurking submarines afforded the handicap.
Living and messing conditions aboard were far superior to those of the first crossing. Men were numbered and fed at specific times, announced over the ship's public address system. There was little line-sweating for chow.
Further, returning veterans said the food was excellent. They particularly cited the white bread served at every meal, the first most of them had eaten in two years. Chicken, steak and fresh fruit and milk added a solid solid to the full menu.
As for sleeping accomodation, the return trip saw none of the eastbound alternation that meant one night on a hard, chilly deck and the next in one of the many canvas-bottomed bunks crammed into cabins originally designed for two or three occupants. True, the men were sardined below decks, but each had his bunk to himself all the way. Yet many hit the deck and the railings on the last day, when the blow was heaviest and three-dimensional mal-de-mer in assorted intensities overtook the less able sailors.
NEW YORK !
PIER 90 brought the men home next to old 91, from which they had sailed. But whereas the department for combat had been shrouded in silence and semi-secrecy, the homecoming was brightened by the mid-afternoon sunlight and enlivened by the screams of harbor craft and the musical welcome of good army bands in the harbor and the dock.
As with the men who came into Grenier Field, it was a beverage that made the biggest hit with the seaborne returnees when they hit the dock. There were the ARC volunteers, with their doughnuts. But there, too, instead of coffee, was milk, and soldiers drank their way through gallons of it.
From the pier Major Wilcox led his way by train to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, where within 48 hours, they were broken up into regional groups for shipment to separate centers, a set up parallel to that encountered by the air travellers who broke up at Myles Standish. Yet there was an exception, one which still rankles in the mind of every man who came home by bomber.
Taking the processing encountered at Fort Dix as possibly the most graphic example, there every by-sea returnees with 85 or more points was asked, point plank, whether he wanted further services or discharge. Only certainly rare instances of supercritical MOS held a man back from this hand-out. Consequently many of those who headed home from Fix did so to stay, while the rest took their 30 days of temporary freedom before returning for assignment to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
SIOUX FALLS - BOOM TOWN
Air returnees began arriving at Sioux Falls AAF about 20 July, from which date the stream steadily increased in volume through the ensuing six weeks. Officers and men traveled to Sioux Falls for full screening and processing, based primarily upon their military occupational specialties and the number of points they held under the Adjusted Service Rating system. In answer to the question of further overseas service, which had been plaguing everyone's mind while at home, there was offered an unqualified choice for all who had completed at least one six-month tour of duty overseas, or who had accomplished 18 combat missions or 150 combat hours as an air crewman.
Sioux Falls air base, politically hand-raised child of Chan Gurney, South Dakota's member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, was well up to its neck coping with thousands of incoming returnees at the time of the 381st's arrival. Thus by 8 August there were an estimated 20,000 transients needing processing, bed and board during their stay. This varied from a week or two in the case of ground echelon personnel, to as much as six weeks for many gunners. And incoming shipments of 2,300 troops from 8th and 15th Air Force bombardment groups and there service outfits was not uncommon. Late in July and early August out-shipments regularly fell below the daily count of those received.
Such a vast overpopulation was borne in addition to the base's approximately 3,000 permanent part enlisted men and women. Absolutely essential to the expedition of the mass processing program, there numbers were being steadily augmented by hand-picked specialists, mainly clerks, from the ranks of the transients.
FINIS FOR THE GROUP
It was at Sioux Falls that the 381st learned of its impending de-activation. This was to have taken place in July, but orders had not been received by mid-August.
Disposition of 381st personnel followed the ordinary pattern prescribed by the 2nd Air Force HQ, which was mainly concerned with the training of B-29 Superfortress groups and replacement crews for the Far East conflict. The great majority of transients were, in the order of their arrival at Sioux falls, shipped out to various CCTS, OTU and gunnery school posts of the 2nd Air Force. Those not to be trained for further overseas duty, or slated for permanent party posts in the States, expected to resume temporary jobs while awaiting separation on the basis of local quotas. But until each individual's arrival at such a station, he was carried as a member of the 381st on detached service to 2nd Air Force.
All TAT equipment ended its overseas and cross-country shipment in a huge pile at one end of the base's old "Stone Hangar", where it due time it was turned over to the 2nd Air Force by Captain Bill Tutsock, 381st assistant materiel officer.
Lt Col Hall and squadron commanders, Major Edward H. McNeill, 532nd; Major Ewing S. Watson, 533rd; Major Douglas L. Winter, 534th; Captain William Cronin, 535th, were last recorded as being held at Sioux Falls pending assignment in the 2nd Air Force. As second-tour combat pilots, the four squadron leaders faced excellent prospects for honorable discharges.
In fact, with the announcement of two Air Force "Atomic Bomb" attacks on a pair of Japan's key industrial cities -Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and the entrance of the USSR into the war against Japan on 7 August 1945, it became increasingly indicative that the men of the 381st might well end their military careers of World War II awaiting discharge at Army Air Forces bases coast to coast.
Having entered the war the officers and men of the 381st, more than justified their trust among the senior members of the 8th Air Force's First Division, understood the plan and its goal. For they loaded the bombs, changed the engines, briefed the crews and equipped the planes, hauled the payload and breached the opposition, time and time again, until "bombs away" meant the climax of a factory-smooth operation so routine and unglamorous that all knew VE Day's realization could be but a matter of hard work, time and casualties expended on a dirty but necessary job. And that, under the decorations and citations, the foolishness and fun, the frustration and bitterness, the camaraderie and the novelty of life in a strange but essentially understandable corner of the world, was quite what the war proved to be for the 381st Bombardment Group.
HEADQUARTERS
SIOUX FALLS ARMY AIR FIELD
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
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15 August 1945
CERTIFICATE
I hereby certify that, to the best of my information and belief, file copies of the complete historical records of the 381st Bombardment Group (H), covering the period from activation, 1 January 1943, through 15 May 1945, and exclusive of the final installment as prepared per instructions contained in Letter 314.7, HQ, SFAAF, Sioux Falls, S.D., 14 July 1945, Subject: Histories of Units inactivated or disbanded at Sioux Falls Army Air Field, have been forwarded to Headquarters, Eighth Air Force, through HQ, First Air Division, APO 577, U.S. Army.
I further certify that completion in narrative form of the unit's history, covering the period from 15 May 1945 through inactivation, was accomplished this date at Sioux Falls Army Air Field.
CHARLES R. McCARTHY,
Captain, AC,
Adjutant.
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