Stories – A Box of Old Letters

Tom Parks

September 1943

On September 4th, 1943, Convoy UT-1, carrying 13,000 American troops, including my father and the more than three hundred airmen of the Martin Provisional Group, arrived in Scotland.

Within a day or two, the new bomber crews were at Combat Crew Replacement Center #11 at the airbase at Bovingdon just outside of London. Years later, my father would note that, in retrospect, he should have paid more attention to what the term ‘replacement crew‘ actually signified.

After a couple of weeks of lectures about the realities of air combat at CCRC #11, the replacement crews were assigned to bomb groups scattered across the East Anglia region of England.

On or about Tuesday, September 21st, 1943, 2nd Lt. Parks and his crew arrived at the 96th Bomb Group in the village of Snetterton Heath eighty miles northeast of London.

East Anglia

Historically flat and swampy, the East Anglia region of Great Britain has a long and storied past. The area was first recognized as a distinct region in the year 520 and for a brief period in the following century, East Anglia was the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. That brief moment of glory ended when East Anglia was mercilessly defeated by the Mercians and King Offa of Mercia had King Æthelberht of East Anglia unceremoniously beheaded. Actually, he could have been ceremoniously beheaded, the text books don’t really say one way or the other. All we know for sure is, Æthelberht lost his head and Offa was responsible.

By WWII, the marshes and fens of late King Æthelberht’s once proud and mighty kingdom had been filled in, dried out, and converted to what is, to this very day, excellent farm land that produces among other things, wheat, barley, potatoes, and sugar beets.

In 1942, the 8th Air Force arrived in England and began scouting for suitable locations for airfields from which they could send multitudes of heavy bombers to destroy the industrial might of the Third Reich. They took one long admiring look at the farms of East Anglia and immediately decided the area’s open and monotonously level topography was just the ticket.

While we’re on the subject of the topography and agriculture of East Anglia, permit me a brief digressional anecdote.

During the Second World War, farms in the region around the 96th Bomb Group, were widely known for producing vast quantities of Brussels sprouts. Since the vegetable’s introduction in England in the late 19th century, the people of Britain had become inexplicably fond of these… What are essentially just tiny cabbages.

American military personnel serving in England were, for the most part, unfamiliar with the Brussel Sprout but because of its local availability, the flight crews at the 96th were served a lot of them, on a very regular basis, mostly boiled. According to my father, boiled Brussel sprouts was not a popular menu item among his comrades. In fact, the dish was so universally unpopular and reviled that the pilots with whom my father served swore a solemn oath to one another, promising that if any of them were ever returning from a mission in a B-17 so badly shot-up they were forced to crash land it on a nearby piece of flat, East Anglian farmland, they would do everything in their power to put the big, heavy, four-engine bomber down, wheels up in a field of Brussel sprouts.

Snetterton Heath

Ancient documents show Snetterton’s place name was first mentioned in the year 1086, twenty years after the French led by William the Conqueror beat the English under Kind Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Eight hundred and fifty-seven years later, in September of 1943, when Lt. Parks first laid eyes on Snetterton Heath, the tiny village consisted of a pub, a post office, and a small, 700-year-old parish church which served a local community of less than two hundred people. Today, the village is simply called, ‘Snetterton‘ and currently boasts a population of two hundred and one.

The biggest change to the parish since the war is the addition of a popular, well-known motor car and motorcycle raceway built on the site of the old military air field.

As fans arrive for a big race at the Snetterton Circuit, those who are aware of the area’s history may take note of small weed-choked sections of concrete around the perimeter of the track. They are all that’s left of the three runways from which, eighty years earlier, my father and hundreds of young men just like him lifted off from a small East Anglian airfield in thundering formations of four engine bombers and flew across the English Channel to fight and die for democracy.

*The airfield at Snetterton Health during WWII. The three runways in a triangle was a very typical layout for bomber bases in England. The top of the image is north*. – Wikipedia

The 96th Bomb Group

The original thirty-eight crews of the 96th Bomb Group that came to England from the States began arriving in April of 1943. By May, the group was fully assembled and began flying missions on the 13th of that month.

For each mission, a bomb group would contribute a formation of twenty or so bombers.

My father’s arrival in Britain in September of 1943 was part of a dramatic expansion of the air war over Europe. Of the more than thirty crews of the Martin Provisional Group that had trained and traveled together since arriving in Walla Walla, Washington in mid-May of 1943, eighteen would be sent to the 96th. They would make up 40% of the forty-five new crews that arrived there that September.

That month, the 96th BG doubled in size and would begin sending two formations of around twenty planes per mission. In October of 1943, missions of over three hundred bombers were common. By late 1944, the 8th Air Force was mounting missions of more than one thousand bombers. Multiply the number of bombers on a mission by ten crewmen and you begin to understand how many young lives were at risk each and every time they flew into combat.

East Anglia is the bulging region on the upper right. The bomber bases are indicated by the circles, squares, and triangles. The square for the 96th Bomb Group is on the right a little less than halfway down the page. 303rd Bomb Group http://www.303rdbg.com

The 96th BG was divided into four squadrons, the 337th, 338th, 339th, and 413th. Each contained upwards of twenty B-17 crews. Shortly after arriving at the 96th, 2nd Lieutenants Parks, O’Dell, Nettles, Scarborough, and McDowell joined the 339th Squadron. The twelve officers of the Parks, Nettles, and Scarborough crews immediately laid claim to an unoccupied 12-man Nissen hut in the 339th’s living area and the friends settled in for the duration.

When he arrived at the 96th, 2nd Lt. Parks had a total of five months of experience flying B-17s. His flight record for September 1943 shows he had accumulated 200 hours at the controls of the plane he was about to fly into combat over Europe. For comparison, to be hired by an airline to haul passengers from Boston to Miami with no one shooting at you, pilots are required to have 1500 hours of flight time.

*2nd Lt. Parks Flight Record for September 1943* *showing the only two days he flew that month*.

When he arrived at the 96th Bomb Group, Lt. Parks had not flown one of the big bombers in almost two months. On the 27th of September, to knock off some rust and familiarize himself with the East Anglia landmarks that would guide him back to his base, he flew a three hour orientation flight. On the 28th, he flew another hour and fifty minutes, and on October 1st, he flew three hours and fifteen minutes. The next day, Saturday, October 2nd, he flew his first combat mission.

Thursday – September 23rd – The mission to Kerlin Bastard

Because of a four-day stretch of bad weather, this mission would be the 96th Bomb Group’s first since the arrival of the new crews from the Martin Provisional Group on or about the 21st of September.

That Thursday, the 8th Air Force was sending a little over 300 bombers to three different targets in France.

The 96th would join two other bomb groups, the 385th and the 94th in a sixty-three plane formation and bomb a German airfield just northwest of a French wide-spot-in-the-road called, Kerlin Bastard. Seriously, look it up on Google Maps. There is nothing there but a few farm houses and a patisserie called ‘Ty Cookies‘.

If you’re so inclined, and maybe hungry for a French pastry, you can visit Kerlin Bastard. It is right there where it has always been, on the southern coast of Brittany about a two-hour drive west northwest of Nantes.

An Internet search for information about Kerlin Bastard turns up a lot of entries… Pages and pages of entries. Unfortunately, every one of them is somehow about the allies bombing the nearby airfield or about the Germans flying from the airfield during WWII. I found out, for instance, that the great English actor, Leslie Howard, who played Confederate Officer and Georgia plantation owner, Ashley Wilkes in the 1939 blockbuster, Gone With the Wind, was killed in June of 1943 when the KLM Royal Dutch airliner he was taking from Lisbon, Portugal to Bristol, England was shot down over the Bay of Biscay by German fighters flying out of the airfield at Kerlin Bastard.

Of Kerlin Bastard itself, the Internet says next to nothing. It is equally silent on the origins of the location’s intriguing name. However… it does bear noting that although the modern French word for bastard is bâtard, the old French version of the word is bastard. So, we did learn something.

Back at the 96th Bomb Group, as this was the first combat mission the newly arrived crews would see take off, it is likely they were up watching their comrades depart. And later that day, when the bombers were scheduled to return, it is not unreasonable to assume they were at the field anxiously counting the returning planes.

There was another reason they might have been at the field that day. A 26-year-old pilot from Texas, Lt. Ruben William Neie and his crew were flying their 25th mission.

At that point in the war, once airmen completed twenty-five missions, their combat duty was finished and they were sent back to the States. The mission requirement would go up later in the war but in September of 1943, if you got through twenty-five missions, you were headed stateside.

Neie, a tall, blonde, blue-eyed former high-school teacher had joined the Army in 1941, three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the summer of 1942, he was a B-17 co-pilot. In May of 1943, he was given his own crew and began flying combat missions over Europe.

*June 27, 1942 – Fort Worth Star-Telegram –* **Newspapers.com**

Ruben had a close call back in mid-August on a different mission over France. A round from a German fighter’s 20mm canon exploded in the cockpit, slightly injuring Lt. Neie. When he landed back at Snetterton, the pilot went to the base hospital, had his wounds tended to, and returned to flight duty the next day. They were like that.

Now, a month-and-a-half later, the Neie crew’s combat nightmare was almost over. If they completed this last round-trip, they would be one of the first crews at the 96th to survive an entire twenty-five mission tour. The whole base would have been on pins and needles.

That day, after take-off, the 96th had an unusually high number of aborts. Of the twenty bombers that took off, seven were forced to return to base before crossing the English Channel. It didn’t count as an official combat mission until you crossed the Channel into airspace where people were actively trying to kill you. Lt. Neie’s bomber was not among the seven aborts. They were on an official mission. So far so good.

Of the remaining thirteen B-17s from the 96th that bombed the German airfield at Kerlin Bastard, twelve returned safely. One went down with the loss of the entire crew.

At the 96th, as observers on the ground anxiously watched the returning bombers approach the field, one B-17 peeled off from the formation, dove down on the deck, and buzzed the tower shooting signal flares from every open window in the plane. Lt. Ruben Neie and his crew had survived the war. They were going home.

For my father, the 21-year-old as yet untested combat pilot from Georgia, this would have been a very positive sign.

Formation Flying

I came across the image below during my research visit to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. It shows the twenty-one plane ‘A‘ squadron the 96th Bomb group contributed to the 8th Air Force’s mission against Duren, Germany on October 20th, 1943. 2nd Lt. Parks was flying in the high element of that squadron on the far right of the image.

*This is an original document from the pilots’ briefing *on October 20, 1943*. It shows the* *make up of the* *96th BG’s ‘A’ Squadron for that day . The pilot’s name is on the horizontal line. The numbers below the pilot’s name are the last three digits of his plane’s serial number. –* **Original Document/National Archives**

In the same high element, fifty feet above and fifty feet ahead of him off his left wing was his friend, Lt Bruce O’Dell while another long-time friend, Lt. Ed McDowell flew a similar fifty foot separation below and behind him also off his left wing.

Lt. Parks’ friend since they entered the Air Corps, 2nd Lt. Henry ‘Junie‘ Marks, is flying in the “tail-end Charlie’ position on this mission. The lowest and last plane in this kind of formation was very vulnerable to enemy fighters. This position was also called ‘Purple-heart corner‘ or, more ominously, ‘Coffin Corner’

*The red circles indicate Lt. Parks’ position in the squadron the 96th BG sent on the October 20, 1943 mission to Duren, Germany*

As you can see in the above diagram, there were twenty-one large four-engine bombers flying in a box of sky 400 yards wide, 300 yards high, and 200 yards deep. This was the Group Formation.

Next came the Wing Formation made up of three Group Formations.

The Wing formation consisted of approximately 58 to 64 bombers. Larger missions would be made up of multiple Wing formations flying one behind the other at two to three mile intervals.

To form a Wing, the two squadrons from the 96th would join a squadron from the 388th Bomb Group out of Knettishall about six miles from Snetterton Heath.

A base’s bombers would take off in 30-second intervals then climb, often through cloud cover and at a specified altitude, they would circle their bases until their bomb group’s squadron or squadrons were assembled. Once assembled, they would head for the Wing rallying point.

Although B-17s were equipped with radios, security demanded that they be used only in dire emergencies. Bombers slotted themselves into the giant circling formations visually using tail markings and a system of color coded flares that could be fired from the aircraft. Flare codes changed from mission to mission. Confusion was not uncommon.

Once formed, the Wing would then home in on a designated radio beacon that marked the assembly point for all of the Wings participating in the mission. At that point the individual Wings would fall in one behind the other at three-mile intervals to assemble into one large formation.

As the large formation assembled over the coast of England, the spares would fill in for any aircraft from their Bomb Group that had to abort before leaving the coast. Mechanical problems, equipment failure, or a crew member’s sudden illness were the most common reasons a bomber would abort a mission. After the formation headed across the English Channel, any remaining spares would leave the giant formation and return to their bases. From that point on, any bombers that aborted left gaps in the formation that the remaining bombers were required to close by adjusting their positions.

By 1945, formations of over one thousand bombers were a regular feature of the American effort to defeat Nazi Germany. During the time of those enormous raids, 2nd Lt. Evelyn Cole, 2nd Lt. Parks’ future wife, was stationed in France at a U.S. Army Mobile Hospital. Years after the war, she would tell her son that the bomber formations were so large it would take an hour for them to pass overhead.

Tight formations served two purposes. As everyone dropped their bombs based on the lead bomber, a tight formation produced a tight pattern of bombs. Remember, this was way before today’s ‘smart’ bombs. Guided only by gravity, these bombs were very, very dumb. They simply fell where they were dropped. That’s one of the reasons the 8th Air Force was sending so many bombers… Dropping a lot of bombs slightly increased the chances that a few might hit something important.

The second purpose of a tight formation was defensive. Of the ten-man crew on each B-17, everyone but the pilot and co-pilot had a machine gun to fire at incoming enemy aircraft. In theory, a tight formation meant a lot of concentrated firepower covering a relatively small area.

Tragically, tight formations also meant that, sometimes, B-17s accidentally flew into one another, or dropped bombs on one another, or shot up one another. That’s just another shitty reality of of war… There are a lot of sad, senseless ways for very young people to die in addition to getting killed by the enemy.

It is important to remember, all of this flying and forming and adjusting was often being done in radio silence, in less than ideal weather conditions by pilots with less than a year’s experience at the controls of a four-engine bomber. Pilots who were, for the most part, in their early twenties… And this was all before they got to the Continent and strangers started shooting at them.

Sunday – September 26th

The 96th led the Wing formation in a successful attack on a German airfield near Rheims, France. No one got shot down. No one got hurt. The newly arrived crews would have been encouraged by these results. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

Monday – September 27th

In the dawn hours of September 27th, the inhabitants of Snetterton Heath were shaken from their sleep by the roar twenty-one B-17s from the 96th Bomb Group taking off and beginning to assemble for a mission to bomb the port of Emden, Germany.

During WWII, in England, it was the policy and practice of the 8th Air Force that a newly arrived pilots would fly their first mission as co-pilot for a combat experienced pilot and that pilot’s equally experienced crew.

On the 27th, dad’s friend, 2nd Lt. Cecil Blaine Fisher flew his first mission as co-pilot to Flight Officer, Alfred Drabnis.

*Cadet Cecil Blaine Fisher – Carlstrom Field – Arcadia, Florida – Circa September, 1942*

2nd Lt. Fisher had enlisted in Washington, D.C. at the same time as 2nd Lt. Parks. Cecil’s name appears on a set of orders my father received from the Air Corps dated April, 4, 1942. (See below)

*Orders for Aviation Cadets to report for pre-flight training – April 4, 1942*

Fisher and Parks would train and travel together from April 11, 1942 until their graduation from fight school and their promotion to 2nd Lieutenant on February 16, 1943 in Columbus, Mississippi.

*2nd Lt. Cecil Fisher – Columbus Army Flying School – Columbus, Mississippi – Circa February, 1943*

After graduation, 2nd Lieutenants Parks and Fisher were assigned to Transition Training where they learned to fly B-17s. Lt. Parks went to Smyrna, Tennessee, Lockbourne, Ohio, and Walla Walla, Washington before being sent overseas with the Martin Provisional Group. Fisher trained in different locations around the States and came overseas by a different route but they both arrived in England within a couple days of one another and reunited at the same small airbase in East Anglia flying with the 96th BG in the 339th Squadron.

On that Monday morning, twenty-eight year old, Cecil Fisher would probably have been delighted to find out he had been assigned to fly as co-pilot with the crew of F/O Alfred Drabnis.

Twenty-five-year-old Drabnis was from Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He had enlisted in the Army in 1939 and was stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 when Hawaii was attacked by the Japanese. Uninjured, he was sent back to the States for flight training.

When Cecil Fisher was assigned as his co-pilot, Alfred had been flying combat missions for five months. He had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with an Oak Leak Cluster and, like his fellow pilot, Lt. Ruben Neie two days before, Alfred was about to complete his 25th and last mission. There would be much celebrating upon their return.

*October 10, 1943 –* *The Pottsville Republican – Pottsville, Pennsylvania –***Newspapers.com**

The only thing out of the ordinary that morning was that the Drabnis crew would not be flying their usual B-17, ‘Daisy June IV‘ (also known as ‘Bomb-Boogie‘). At the mission briefing, they found out they had been assigned to fly, “The Queen of the Skies“. Daisy June had been flying combat for nine months, The Queen had only been in service four months. For crews in desperate need of an edge, there were different ways of looking at this. In The Queen‘s favor, she was most certainly the newer, fresher aircraft. However, Daisy June had a long (in terms of aerial combat) proven history of survival which could be a sign… To those seeking signs… That she might be imbued with an extra dose of luck.

*Daisy June IV/Bomb Boogie at the 96th Bomb Group Circa July, 1943. The fifteen bombs painted on the nose of the B-17 indicate she has flown 15 combat missions.*

Emden is a seaport city in northwest Germany. During the war, it was targeted in an effort to eliminate Germany’s industrial output and ability. Military and industrial targets were very specific but, as I pointed out earlier, the high explosives they were dropping were very dumb. Over the course of two years, allied bombing would destroy 80% of the city.

On the 27th, the 8th Air Force sent 308 bombers of which 246 bombed the target. The 96th BG contributed a single squadron of twenty-one B-17s. From take-off to landing, crews would be in the air for a little over six hours. With any luck, they’d be back in time for lunch.

Flight crews would have been awakened around two in the morning for breakfast and briefings. Ground crews would already be loading fuel and bombs. Pilots, Navigators, Bombardiers, and gunners went to individual briefings.

Trucks would take crews to their planes where they would prepare their aircraft for combat and don all the heavy cold-weather gear (some of which was electrically heated) required to do battle in an open, unpressurized B-17 flying five miles above the earth.

There were oxygen system checks and intercom system checks, navigators would lay out and review their charts, radio operators would check settings and codes issued at their briefing, gunners would mount their guns and distribute ammunition throughout the plane, and pilots and co-pilots would run their cockpit check lists ensuring their plane was ready to fly.

As co-pilot for F/O Drabnis’ crew, Lt. Cecil Fisher must have felt pretty lucky to be aboard The Queen of the Skies that morning. Alfred and his crew had done this combat prep twenty-four times now and they knew what they were doing. One more round trip and they were all going home.

Aside from not being assigned to fly their trusted Daisy June IV, there was only one other real negative that morning. Drabnis and The Queen had been assigned to fly in the low element of the 96th BG’s squadron. Low elements were notoriously prone to receiving a lot of attention from enemy fighter. On the positive side, he was flying in the low element’s lead position and not in the rear… A position ominously known as, ‘Coffin Corner‘.

*Diagram showing the position of F/O Drabnis’ B-17 on the mission to Emden on September 27th, 1943*

Of the twenty-one planes the 96th put up on the 27th, two aborted before reaching the Emden. Of the remaining nineteen B-17s… Eighteen returned. The lucky streak of Alfred Drabnis and his experienced crew had ended. For 2nd Lt. Cecil Fisher, their newly arrived co-pilot on his first mission, his lucky streak never got started.

Over Emden, the B-17s had just finished dropping their bombs when enemy fighters slashed through the formation. Drabnis began calling out their positions over the intercom for his gunners to fire upon. The one that took out The Queen of the Skies attacked her head-on.

After the mission, several airmen from planes behind The Queen reported that as the fighters made their attack, she peeled off from the formation with two engines on fire and began a slow and what appeared to be controlled downward spiral.

However, ‘controlled‘ was the last word The Queens’ crew would have used to describe the situation inside their crippled bomber.

Three rounds from the burst of 20mm cannon fire that took out two of the bombers four engines had penetrated crew areas. One round shattered the plexiglass nose of the plane striking the navigator, 22-year-old 2nd Lt. Lester Arthur Leonard in the chest. Lester looked at his bombardier, 22-year-old 2nd Lt. Stewart Edward Cooper, pointed at his wound, and died.

In the cockpit, two additional rounds crashed through front windscreen. One hit Alfred Drabnis’ in the face killing him instantly. The second round exploded in the cockpit seriously wounding 2nd Lt. Fisher.

Fisher’s pilot was dead, his left foot and left hand were mangled, the planes’ controls were inoperative, two engines were on fire, the bomber was spiraling earthward, and Cecil, now the ship’s commanding officer, could not give the order to bail out because the intercom system had been destroyed.

Fortunately, the surviving members of the Drabnis crew didn’t need that order. They had seen enough doomed B-17s fall out of the sky to know it was high time for them to go. Quickly clipping their parachutes to the chute harnesses each crew member had donned before boarding the ship, they began tumbling into the sky. The top turret gunner and the radio operator dove through the still open bomb bay. The ball turret and waist gunners exited through the starboard hatch just aft of the waist gun positions. The tail gunner went out through the emergency exit in the tail.

Because of his wounds, Cecil struggled to get his parachute on but finally managed to clip it in place. Dragging himself out of his seat and past the body of his pilot, now slumped forward over the controls, Cecil dropped through the opening behind the cockpit leading to the crawlspace under the flight deck that provided access to the nose of the plane.

Once in the nose of the aircraft, after confirming the navigator was dead, Cecil exited The Queen through the port side hatch which Stewart Cooper, the bombardier had used to make his escape moments before. It was just a little after ten in the morning.

The eight young men who bailed out of The Queen of the Skies were all taken prisoner and six were immediately sent to POW camps for the duration of the war. Badly wounded, Lieutenants Fisher and Cooper were sent to German hospitals where Fisher would lose his left foot and Cooper his left leg to amputation. After recovering, they were both sent to POW camp, Stalag Luft I. Two months later, when 2nd Lt. Parks’ luck ran out, he would be sent to the same camp where he was, once again, reunited with Cecil.

In mid 1944, because of the severity of their injuries, both Fisher and Cooper were returned to the United States in a prisoner exchange. Both airmen were sent to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. for treatment and recovery. Once at Walter Reed, Cecil honored a request my father had made just before Fisher left the German POW camp. From his hospital bed, Cecil called my grandparents, Virginia and Thomas A. Parks, Sr. to tell them that he had seen their only child in Germany and he was doing fine.

During his stay at the hospital, my grandparents visited Cecil frequently. After he was released, he became a regular and honored guest in their home in nearby Accokeek, Maryland. They never forgot him.

One last thought about luck. During his recuperation at Walter Reed, Cecil met and married Lt. Jean E. Morton, a 24-year-old Army Nurse from Iowa who was doing a tour of duty at the Army hospital. Even though Cecil passed away twenty years before Jean and even though she remarried after his death, her 2002 obituary contained a paragraph detailing her marriage to the young bomber pilot and his service to America. She never forgot Cecil either.

On that same tragic day in September, sometime after the bombers left the 96th for Emden, 2nd Lt. Parks took off in a B-17 for the first time in two months for a three-hour orientation flight over East Anglia.

Later that day, when the bombers returned from Emden, he would suffer the twin shocks of finding out that Alfred Drabnis and his crew had gone down on their last mission and that his friend Cecil Fisher had gone down with them on his very first mission. This would have been a sobering counterpoint to the joyous celebration just two days earlier for the Neie crew and a blunt introduction to the real terror of war… Unemotional, uncaring, unfeeling fate.

Tuesday – September 28th , 1943 – Another Training Flight

Because of weather over Europe, there was no mission on the 28th but Lt. Parks and his crew took off and flew around the local area for almost two hours. They could be called for a mission at any time now and the young pilot wanted as much flying time as he could get.

Wednesday – September 29th, 1943

Bad weather. No mission. No flying. Just waiting.

Thursday – September 30th, 1943

Bad Weather. No mission. No flying. Just waiting.

Friday – October 1st, 1943

No mission.

Weather had kept everyone grounded for the last two days of September but cleared enough on the 1st of October for Lt. Parks to go up again… Twice. The first time for an hour and the second time for two hours.

As he squeezed in those three extra hours of flight time, my father had no way of knowing that at the headquarters of the 8th Air Force, a plan was being put in motion that would send him into combat the very next day.

Saturday – October 2nd, 1943 – First Contact

Once the 8th Air Force decided a mission was on, they would send the details to the Division commanders who would send them on to the Wing commanders who would send them to the Bomb Groups for which they were responsible.

Generally, the orders would arrive sometime after midnight. Ground crews would be alerted first. They would get breakfast and begin preparing the bombers. Usually, sometime around three in the morning, air crews would be roused from their sleep and told there was a mission on. The October 2nd mission was slightly different. The bombers wouldn’t be taking off until after lunch. So, Lt. Parks would get a full night’s sleep before being informed that his time had come.

October 2, 1943 – An after-mission debriefing form from the Emden mission showing C.L. Farris, Pilot and T.A. Parks, Co-pilot. This was photographed at the National Archives and Records Administration facility at College Park, Maryland during my research visit in September, 2022. **NARA**

For his first mission, Lt. Parks was assigned to fly with a combat-tested pilot, 2nd Lt. Claude Leroy Farris, Jr. My father quickly learned that in this instance, the term “combat-tested” might be a little overstated.

Lt. Farris had enlisted right after graduating from high school in his hometown of Carlsbad, New Mexico. He became a 2nd Lieutenant in April of 1943, so, technically, 2nd Lt. Parks, who was commissioned two months earlier in February of 1943, outranked him. Farris started his B-17 training in July of 1943, so Lt. Parks literally had three more months more training and flight time than his pilot. And Lt. Farris arrived at the 96th only a week or so before my father so he had, at the most, two missions under his belt. Then there was the startling fact that Lt. Farris was a year younger than his 21-year-old, never-been-in-combat-before, co-pilot. As he suited up for his first combat mission, none of this information would have been reassuring to my father.

At breakfast, in recognition of the fact that this might be their last meal ever, crews flying that day’s mission would get fresh eggs instead of the usual powdered eggs. It was pretty much the least the Air Force could do. No, seriously, they made a list of what they could do for men going off to die and “fresh eggs for breakfast” was right at the bottom. This is not to say the men didn’t appreciate the fresh eggs, they did.

After breakfast, the crews went to the mission briefing. This is where they all found out at the exact same moment what the target was that day. Given what had happened just three days before to Alfred Drabnis and his crew, finding out they were going back to Emden could not have been good news to anyone.

After the general briefing, pilots and co-pilots, Navigators, Bombardiers, Radio Operators, and gunners went to individual briefings specifically tailored to their jobs.

On October 2nd, the 96th’s ‘A‘ squadron would lead the attack in the middle altitude position while the ‘B‘ squadron would fly the high position to its right and a twenty-four plane squadron from the 388 Bomb Group out of Knettishall, flew the low position to its left.

At the pilot’s briefing, Lieutenants Farris and Parks got the first good news of the day, they were flying in the “B” group. Because of their altitude, high groups, generally got less attention from enemy fighters than the lower groups

After their briefings, the bomber crews would ride trucks out to their planes and begin preparing for the battle ahead. At the appointed hour, a single flare from the control tower would arc out over the field and the engines of the 96th Bomb Group would roar to life.

For the rest of the war, residents of Snetterton Heath would be subject to the earth shaking, cup and saucer rattling sound of more than forty heavy bombers taking off and assembling over their tiny and once upon a time bucolic village.

After take off, the Farris and Parks B-17 would join the Wing formation of more than sixty bombers, each carrying three tons of bombs and turn for Germany. Three miles behind them would be another sixty plane Wing formation and three miles behind them would be another sixty plane Wing formation and so on until there were almost three hundred and fifty bombers headed for Emden carrying one thousand tons of high explosives.

Starting with this first raid in October of 1943 and continuing until the end of the war a little over a year and a half later, the 8th Air Force would mount larger and larger missions dropping more and more bombs on Nazi targets until Germany’s ability to wage war simply ceased to exist.

Over Emden, when the bomber formation arrived at the point where they would turn on their bomb run, they discovered that the target was completely obscured by clouds. At 8th Air Force Headquarters almost any commander would tell you this made precision bombing more difficult. Almost any experienced bombardier would tell you this made precision bombing completely fucking impossible.

About half-way through the bomb run, the commander of the group in the lead plane decided they were not lined up correctly on the target and ordered the sixty-plane formation to turn back to the initial point and start the bomb run over again. This order came while the formation was directly over enemy defenses, deep in enemy territory.

As co-pilot, with no real flying to do, 2nd Lt. Parks’ job at that moment mostly consisted of looking out the window watching for incoming enemy fighters, grimly anticipating an anti-aircraft shell exploding somewhere in their plane, and cursing the commander who was ordering them to turn around and do the bomb run again.

Fortunately for all concerned, during the entire time they were over Emden, there was hardly any anti-aircraft fire coming up from the ground and there were no enemy fighters at all. They made the second pass, dropped their bombs through the cloud cover, and blew up random stuff in and around the city of Emden.

During the war, the Germans refereed to Allied bomber crews as, ‘Terrorfliegers‘ (Terror Flyers). My father never doubted the necessity of the air war, and was proud of his service, however, having participated in missions like the one to Emden, he also understood the German’s position.

The after-mission interrogation form from the October 2nd mission (pictured above) shows, Lt. Farris’ report. The young pilot indicates they didn’t observe any results from the bombing and when asked how many enemy fighters they saw, he reports, ‘0’.

For the 8th Air Force, the mission to Emden was not one of its great successes but for the men of the 96th, any mission that everyone came home from was a cause for celebration.

There wouldn’t be many celebrations after Emden.

Following up on Farris and ‘Wildfire‘

This picture of the Farris crew was taken at the 96th BG sometime in late 1943. Twenty-year-old 2nd Lt. Claude L. Farris, Jr. is in the front row on the far left. Sgt. Arthur Siciliano is in the back row on the far right.

On November 5th, 1943, the 96th Bomb Group went on a mission to Gelsenkirchen, Germany. 2nd Lieutenants Farris and Parks both flew the mission, each in command of their own B-17.

That day, the Farris crew was flying a B-17 named, ‘Wildfire’. Shortly before the target an anti-aircraft burst took out Wildfire’s #2 engine. The #2 engine is the one closest to the fuselage on the pilot’s side of the plane. When the anti-aircraft round exploded, shrapnel penetrated the cockpit and seriously wounded Lt. Farris in several places in his left arm.

Although bleeding profusely, the twenty-year-old pilot insisted on staying at the controls until Wildfire’s bombs were dropped. Then, he passed out. Bombardier, 2nd Lt. David Kemper Helsabeck, the twenty-three-year-old son of a North Carolina mail carrier, came up from the nose, got his pilot out of his seat, dragged him back to the front of the plane, and began administering first aid.

In the meantime, Wildfire’s twenty-two-year-old co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Charles Payton Ray was doing everything he could to control the bomber and head for home some 250 miles west of their present position. Ray had a lot to deal with. Unbeknownst to the crew, the same anti-aircraft burst that had taken out the pilot had also wounded Lt. Ray. However, the young Oklahoman stayed silent about his injuries rather than bother the crew with the unsettling news that both of the men who knew how to keep the bomber in the air were badly hurt.

Fortunately, the young co-pilot had help from his flight engineer, T/Sgt. Arthur Frank Siciliano.

Flight engineers were also the top turret gunners on the B-17. Their gun position, just aft of the cockpit, gave them immediate access to the pilot and co-pilot should their engineering duties be required.

Arthur was a first generation Italian American from Massachusetts and the son of a mason. Before the war, Arthur and his younger brother Tom had worked at a gas station so he knew his way around an internal combustion engine. At 5’5″, T/Sgt Siciliano may have been the shortest guy on the plane but he was almost certainly one of the oldest… In four days, if he lived that long, Arthur would celebrate his 29th birthday.

In the crew picture, Arthur is standing the back row on the far right. Looking at the picture of Siciliano, with the brim of his ball cap turned up, you can almost hear the Sergeant growling, “These lieutenants may be hot-shot pilots and fine leaders of men but they don’t know dick about internal combustion engines“.

Arthur Siciliano was just the guy Lt. Ray needed at that moment.

For the next hour and a half, Lt. Ray and Sgt. Siciliano would try desperately to keep the bomber’s remaining three engines operating as they nursed ‘Wildfire‘ homeward. Miraculously, in spite of losing two more engines, they made it back to the 96th. With three engines out and two punctured tires, somehow, the two men got the bomber on the ground in one piece… Relatively speaking.

Both Farris and Ray recovered from their wounds and continued flying until they were shot down on the 31st of January, 1944 on their 19th mission. The entire crew survived and became POWs. Farris and Ray would both end up at the same POW camp Lt. Parks had been sent to a month earlier after he was shot down on November 29th, 1943… While flying the same, ‘Wildfire‘ that Farris had been flying just three weeks earlier on his almost fatal November 5th mission to Gelsenkirchen.

My father re-named ‘Wilfdire‘ the ‘Ramblin’ Wreck‘ partly because he had attended Georgia Tech his freshman year and partly because that is exactly what she was.

COMING SOON – Practicing the Art of War: Episode 12: Black Thursday

Author

Tom Parks

Graduation

By February 1943, America had been in the war for 15 months. On Tuesday the 16th of February, my father graduated from Advanced Pilot Training and became 2nd Lt. Thomas A. Parks, Jr. That same day, the New York Daily News ran the following banner headline.

In 1943, the city is called “Kharkov”, it is in Russia, and it’s citizens are fighting German invaders. Seventy-nine years later and the city’s name has changed to “Kharkiv”, it is in Ukraine, and its citizens are fighting Russian invaders. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

In Columbus, Mississippi, after almost eight months of training without a break, my father and his classmates were eagerly anticipating a leave. So was his mother. After the ceremony, instead of returning home to Washington, D.C., she had gone to stay with her parents in nearby Atlanta just in case “Tommy“, her only child, got a few days off.

In England, on that Mississippi graduation day, the 8th Air Force flew its 36th combat mission of the war. Sixty-five American bombers dropped 160 tons of high explosives on the German U-boat base at Saint-Nazaire, France. Eight of those bombers, each carrying a 10-man crew, didn’t return from the mission and the Air Force found itself needing eighty new airmen, including sixteen new 2nd lieutenants to replace the pilots and co-pilots they lost that day.

It would be another seven and a half months before Lt. Parks would fly his first combat mission. During that time the 8th Air Force would fly sixty-nine more missions. As more aircrews arrived in England, the number of bombers sent on each mission increased to the point that on my father’s first trip to Germany he was part of a force of 350 bombers carrying 3500 airmen. The Army Air Force would need a lot more replacements by the time my father was ready to go to war.

By the end of the war, raids of over 1000 bombers were not uncommon.

But in February of 1943, in Columbus, Mississippi, during the week of the 16th, all the newly minted 2nd Lieutenants had to do was sit around and speculate about what was coming next.

By the evening of Friday the 19th, 2nd Lt. Parks was confident enough they were going to get some time off that he sent the following telegram to his mother in Atlanta.

*February 19th, 1943 – Telegram from 2nd Lt. Parks to his mother*

The very next morning, February 20th, the Army ruined everyone’s weekend by posting Special Orders Number 46.

In August of 1942, a little over six months prior to the posting of the above orders, a group of 284 cadets left Basic Training in Montgomery, Alabama and headed for Arcadia, Florida to learn to fly. Thirteen of the thirty-two names on the above orders assigned to heavy bomber transition training at the Army Airfield in Smyrna, Tennessee were part of that group.

Against some pretty long odds, by the end of September 1943, four of those thirteen pilots; Thomas A. Parks, Jr., Edward F. McDowell, Henry E. Marks, Jr., and Gordon R. Hendricksen, would end up in the same bomb group flying combat missions out of the same small airbase in England.

*2nd Lt. Gordon Rudolf Hendricksen circa February 1943*

In late November 1943, in a letter from England written to his pal Russ Dougherty who was then stationed at Stuggart Army Airfield in Arkansas, my father brings Russ up to date on two of their mutual friends from their training days together.

*Excerpt from Lt. Parks’ November 24th, 1943 letter to Lt. Russ Dougherty* *in Arkansas*

Edward F. McDowell

On Valentine’s Day 1943, in Columbus, Mississippi, just before graduating from Advanced Flight Training and becoming a 2nd Lieutenant, Edward McDowell celebrated his 25th birthday. He went to Europe, flew with the 96th Bomb Group in the same Squadron as 2nd Lts. Parks, Marks, and Hendricksen, and survived the ordeal. He returned home, went to law school, became a practicing attorney, and married and raised a family.

He was the lucky one…

Henry E. Marks, Jr.

In his letter to Russ, Lt. Parks refers to Henry Marks, Jr. as, “Juney” Marks. A junior himself, when my father was growing up, his mother called him, “juney“. To say my father loathed that appellation is to understate his feelings on the matter by several orders of magnitude. So, I find it interesting that he used it in the above correspondence when referring to Henry. I like to imagine, sometime during their training, probably very early on, my father gleefully saddled his comrade with the hated nickname.

Carlstrom Field, Arcadia, Florida circa September 1942

Henry Marks grew up in the southwest corner of Virginia in rural Smyth County not far from that state’s border with North Carolina.

In September 1941, eighty days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Henry traveled 300 miles north to Richmond and on Friday the 19th, enlisted in the United States Army. It is just a guess but his enlistment may have had more to do with getting out of Smyth County than patriotic zeal.

Whatever his reasons for enlisting, by December 1941, America was at war. Henry signed up to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps, ended up in the same training class as my father, and picked up the nickname “juney“.

Seventeen months after beginning basic training, Lieutenants Marks and Parks found themselves at the 96th Bomb Group based in the tiny village of Snetterton Heath in England.

At the beginning of October 1943, the two young men began flying missions. By the end of that month, they and their crews were seasoned combat veterans.

November 13th, 1943 – Bremen

In Dad’s letter to his friend, Russ, he states that “Juney” Marks went down over Munster. The problem with that is… Munster is ninety miles southeast of Bremen. It became clear to me pretty quickly, that this story was going to require some research.

November 13th, 1943 was the 8th Air Force’s 130th mission of the war. The target that day was the German naval facility at the port of Bremen. The 8th planned to send 272 bombers from bases located all over England’s East Anglia region. Bombers from the 96th Bomb Group would join the effort.

Not every crew flew every mission and the Parks crew had that Saturday off. The Marks crew wasn’t so lucky.

The twenty or so bombers the 96th BG would contribute to the large air armada headed for Bremen that day. The bombers from the 96th took off around 7:30 in the morning, formed up with the rest of the force just off the English coast, and headed across the channel. Then, as so often happens in that part of the world in November… The weather went to hell.

A recall order was issued but only 129 bombers got the message. The Marks crew and the remaining 142 B-17s and B-24s dutifully lumbered on through the deteriorating weather to their designated target.

On the internet, the most common version of what happened next is that near Bremen, the Marks B-17 suffered a collision with another B-17 and crashed.

The document below is the Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) for Marks and the nine men under his command. Whenever a plane didn’t return, this document was filled out “within 48 hours of the time an aircraft is officially reported missing“. The MACR was meant to contain as much information about the plane, its crew and their collective fate as could be gathered from anyone who might have witnessed anything related to their disappearance.

The Henry Marks MACR

The import lines are 4, 5, 11, and 13. The three Lieutenants listed at line 11 as witnesses were flying in nearby bombers and all indicate that at 11:37 am at longitude & latitude 53.30 N, 08.50 E, they saw the Marks B-17 being “Rammed by another B-17 in midair“.

Line 13 indicates that even though the witnesses believe the aircraft lost, they did not see the final outcome of the collision.

The longitude and latitude on the MACR put the collision over the German village of Schawnewede, about 10 miles northwest of Bremen and only a tenth of a degree from where the group would turn onto its bomb run.

Official reports indicate the first bombs were dropped on the target at 11:20 and the last at 11:45. At 11:37, when the collision took place, the Marks plane was at a time and position that would have put it among the last American bombers over Bremen that day.

Most online accounts say that after contact with the other bomber, the Marks’ plane immediately spun out of control and crashed, three of the crew survived, and the other B-17 managed to return to England. These accounts were written decades later and I believe are generally based on what is reported in the MACR.

The problem with this narrative is, the witnesses didn’t report a crash and German and Dutch records show the Marks plane crashing at 12:15 pm, thirty-eight minutes after the collision and 100 miles southwest of Schawnewede near the village of Ommen, in the Netherlands.

German records indicate that a German fighter pilot, Oberleutnant Wolfgang Neu, was credited with shooting down the Marks B-17 at 12:15 pm. Dutch records confirm the crash and identification of the same B-17, as well as the identification of seven fatalities and three survivors from the Marks crew around that same time.

My Best Guess

There’s no way of knowing for certain but from the information I found, here’s my take on what happened that day.

There were three witnesses to the collision near Bremen, so I believe that happened where and when they said it did. However, none of the witnesses reported seeing the bomber spin out of control. Because I do not believe thirty-eight minutes is enough time for the Marks bomber to complete their bomb run and then get down to Ommen, I believe the Marks B-17 was damaged in the collision, broke off its bomb run, and headed home along the mission’s planned return route to England.

8th Air Force maps for that day show the return from Bremen was to the southwest from Bremen over the Netherlands, a route that would have taken the Marks bomber close to the village of Ommen and, interestingly, only 60 miles due west of Munster. While still not “over Munster“, Ommen is significantly closer to that city than Bremen.

A little over thirty-eight minutes after the collision… At 25000 feet over Ommen… Twenty-four-year-old Henry Marks and his crew ran into Wolfgang Neu who was hunting American bombers returning from Bremen.

There are no reports detailing the interaction between the two enemy aircraft but Dutch reports say that the debris from the Marks B-17 was widely scattered indicating it broke up or blew up in midair.

The bodies of Marks and six of his crew were found among the debris of their fallen bomber.

Only three airmen made it out of the plane, the waist gunners, S/Sgts Francis Ferrick and Eugene Fennell and the co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Wilbur Hyman Brown. Brown and Fennell were badly injured and spent more than a month in a German hospital before being sent to their respective POW camps. Even though Ferrick had an ankle injury, he was imprisoned immediately.

Bomber crews did not normally wear their parachutes during missions. They wore a harness to which they clipped the chute once given the order to prepare to bail out. I believe that after the bomber was damaged in the collision, as a precaution, Marks gave his crew the order to don their parachutes… I think, whether they bailed out or were blown out of the bomber, that precaution may be why Lt. Brown and the two sergeants survived the catastrophic destruction of their aircraft.

By the end of December, when Henry Marks’ co-pilot, Lt. Brown reached Stalag I, the POW camp where he would spend the rest of the war, Lt. Thomas Parks was already there, having been shot down on November 29th, sixteen days after his pal “Juney“… On another 8th Air Force mission to Bremen.

Gordon R. Hendricksen

Like Marks and McDowell, Gordon Hendricksen had been with my father from the very beginning of his military service. It is a puzzle as to why he is not mentioned in my father’s letter to Russ. After all that time together, they had to have been acquainted with one another. I can only infer, that they just ran in different circles.

In Columbus, Mississippi, on the 16th of February 1943, when 23-year-old Gordon Hendricksen became a 2nd Lieutenant, he was exactly one week away from what would turn out to be his last birthday.

Like my father, Gordon joined the Army Air Force in early 1942. They went through flight training together, went through crew training together, crossed the Atlantic together, were sent to the same airbase in England together, and, on November 29th, 1943, on the same mission to Bremen, they and their crews were both declared missing in action at exactly the same time… 14:40.

It is at this exact moment their fates radically diverge.

At 14:40, on November 29, 1943, my father and his crew bailed out of their stricken bomber, were captured, and became prisoners of war, and at the end of the conflict, were liberated and returned to the United States where they all resumed their lives.

At 14:40, on November 29, 1943, Lt. Gordon Hendricksen and his crew disappeared from the face of the earth… forever.

The Hendricksen MACR

When I first looked at the document, I immediately noticed… The crew Lt. Hendricksen disappeared with was not the crew he trained, crossed the Atlantic, and arrived with at the 96th Bomb Group in England.

The Original Hendricksen Crew

I found them in a separate MACR from December 20th, 1943. It appears after 2nd Lt. Hendricksen disappeared over Bremen on November 13th, 1943, eight of the nine members of Hendricksen’s original crew were assigned to fly with pilot, 1st Lt. Stanley Budleski and his co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Bernard Jackson.

At the same time, Hendricksen’s original co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Robert Lawrence Arsingstall, Jr. was promoted to pilot and assigned a crew of his own. By the end of the war, Arsingstall had been promoted to Captain and awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Robert returned to the States, married, raised a family, and died in 2007 in Oklahoma City.

The eight members of the Hendricksen crew assigned to fly with 1st Lt. Budleski weren’t so lucky. On the 20th of December, 1943, on their sixth mission together, they were shot down… on yet another mission to Bremen.

Four of the original members of the Hendricksen crew died on that mission, along with their new pilot and co-pilot. The remaining four members of the original Hendricksen crew survived as prisoners of war.

November 29, 1943 – Bremen

Why Gordon was flying with another crew on this mission, is lost to history. Because he was a 2nd Lieutenant and his co-pilot that day was a higher-ranked 1st Lieutenant, Stanley C. Wells, a possible explanation is, that the crew was that of Lt. Wells and for that mission, he had been assigned command duties involving the leading formation. Pilots given that kind of assignment would ask another pilot to fly in their seat so they could concentrate on the larger responsibility of guiding the group.

The only thing that is known for sure about what happened to the plane Hendricksen was piloting that day is, they left England for Bremen, Germany and they didn’t return. There were no witnesses. No wreckage was ever found. No bodies were ever found. The supposition is, for reasons unknown, they crashed in the North Sea or the English Channel. They were not the first airmen to disappear this way and they would not be the last.

After the war, on September 3rd, 1945, 2nd Lt. Gordon Hendricksen and the men he flew with that day were declared deceased and their names were added to the Tablets of the Missing at Cambridge American Cemetery in England. The monument is inscribed with over 5000 names of Americans missing in action or lost or buried at sea during WWII.

In Remembrance:

2nd Lt. Gordon R. Hendricksen: (24) Pilot – From Heron, Minnesota, before the war, Gordon lived with his brother and his brother’s wife and worked on their farm.

*Circa August 1942 – Carlstrom Field, Arcadia, Florida*

1st Lt. Stanley Clark Wells: (24) Co-pilot – Stan was from Southern California. He and his wife, Evelyn, were married in California on November 28, 1942. Stanley died in Europe exactly one day after his and Evelyn’s 1st anniversary.

Newspapers.com – Long Beach Press-Telegram
Long Beach, California 21 Apr 1943

2nd Lt. Joseph Watson Taylor: (22) Navigator – “Taylor” was from Verona, New Jersey. A graduate of an elite prep school, by the time he was 21, he had gotten a degree from Dartmouth.

*Joseph Taylor’s* *1937 yearbook (the Old Gold & Blue) photo from The Peddie School. In 2015, Peddie was ranked 13th on a list of Most Elite Boarding Schools In The US.* – **Ancestry.com**

2nd Lt. James “Jimmie” Valentine Rose: (28) Bombardier – The oldest member of the crew, Jim was from Los Angeles and lived there with his wife Miriam and their infant son… Jim Jr. In 1940, on his draft card, Jim, a former member of the Lake Erie Summer Theater and a graduate of the El Capitan School of Stage and Screen, listed his occupation as, “Freelance Actor“.

T/Sgt Edwin E. Bowersox: (22) Radio Operator – Ed grew up west of Allentown, Pennsylvania in rural Snyder County. He was single, worked on his parents’ farm, and was their only child. He died 12 days after his 22nd birthday.

T/Sgt William J. Vargo: (23) Top Turret Gunner – Another Pennsylvania native, Bill grew up south of Pittsburgh in the area around Uniontown and before joining the Army, worked as a laborer for the WPA. Bill was single and the 2nd oldest of seven children of Hungarian immigrants.

S/Sgt Lewis Earl Devoe: (24) Ball Turret Gunner – From Spokane, Washington, Lewis had attended Washington State University before the war. He was single and at 5’4″ and 123 lbs, was the perfect size for the cramped, claustrophobia-inducing confines of a B-17 ball turret.

*Sophomore Lewis Devoe – Sigma Nu – Washington State University – 1940* – **Ancestry.com**

S/Sgt Jack Cozette Clackley: (20) Right Waist Gunner – From Greenville, Alabama, this tall, blue-eyed, red-head worked at an Alabama cotton mill before enlisting. He was the youngest member of the bomber crew.

Cpl Ferdinand “Fred” A. Monier, Jr.: (21) Left Waist Gunner – From San Antonio, Texas, Fred worked at the Paul Wright Electric Company before enlisting.

S/Sgt Garnet John Wood: (26) Tail Gunner – From Batavia, New York, before the war, Garnet, a machinist, was employed by the Eastman Kodak Company. At the time of his disappearance, Garnet’s younger brother, John was also missing in action in Europe. His older brother was serving with the Army in Hawaii.

Garnet, the crews’ other red-headed gunner left behind a wife, Helen and a 4-year-old son, James.

Smyrna and B-17 Transition Training

In Columbus, Mississippi, on February 20th, 1943, when the 32 new pilots assigned to heavy bomber training in Smyrna, Tennessee got Special Orders Number 46… they were blissfully unaware of what was in store for them. All they knew was, that they had one day to get to Smyrna and report for duty.

The pace of their education was about to kick into high gear. By August, Lt. Parks would be on a ship in a convoy headed for England and the war. That meant, he only had five months to gain a complete understanding of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress… The most complex aircraft of its day. Pilots were expected not only to learn to fly the plane but to acquire a thorough working knowledge of all the bomber’s avionic, hydraulic, fuel, communications, weapons, and life support systems.

For my father, there was a growing realization that his understanding of all the component parts of the B-17 could mean the difference between life and death for him and the nine men under his command.

It was a heavy responsibility.

That is probably why, from this point forward, there are almost no personal photographs. It is also why his mother would spend the rest of the time he was flying B-17s complaining that he was not writing her enough letters.

2nd Lt. Parks arrived at Smyrna Airfield on Saturday, February 21, 1943. It had been almost exactly six months since his first solo flight back in Arcadia, Florida and he had a little over 201 hours of flight time in various single and twin-engine aircraft to his credit. In the next five months, he would put in an additional 275 hours flying big, four-engine B-17s.

*24 days after arriving, Lt. Parks writes his first letter home from Smyrna, Tennessee*. *For more on why my father was,* “*…shocked to hear about Fred*“, *read*, 4. Learning the Art of War – Advanced Flight.

2nd Lt. Parks begins his first letter in a month to his mother with an immediate apology, followed by an explanation for his tardiness. “We’re on the flight line six hours a day and ground school three“.

On days he wasn’t flying a B-17, or in ground school, he spent time in a Link Trainer.

Originally created in 1929 to teach pilots how to fly at night using only the instruments in their cockpit as a spatial reference, Link Trainers were the state-of-the-art when it came to flight simulators during WWII.

The trainer responded to pilot input on flight controls and rotated through three axes. It simulated all flight instruments as well as conditions such as pre-stall buffet and spins. With its removable opaque canopy, it was very useful for instrument and navigation training.

In those days, there were no computers as we know them. The Link Trainer was an analog device that had more in common with the mechanical bull made popular by John Travolta and Debra Winger in the movie, Urban Cowboy.

As noted in his monthly Flight Record (see below), while he was at Smyrna, 2nd Lt. Parks spent eight hours in a Link Trainer.

*Instructor communicating with trainee in the Link Trainer*

Flying Over Atlanta

In the March 16th letter to his mother that contains his apology for the long delay in writing her, he tells Virginia that he was, “over Atlanta last night“. 2nd Lt. Parks doesn’t mention that he was in the air for five hours that evening and that in that time period he had been over Atlanta twice.

On the evening of March 15th, to practice cross-country nighttime navigation, he flew a B-17 on a non-stop two-and-a-half-hour flight from Smyrna, Tennessee to Birmingham, Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia, and back to Smyrna… The first time as pilot, the second time as co-pilot.

2nd Lt. Parks’ Flight Record for the month of March 1943. It shows the five-hour flight over Atlanta on the 15th. It also shows his transfer date to Lockbourne Army Airbase in Ohio as March 29th, 1943.

*This page indicates that the five hours of flying my father did on the 15th were at night.*

GROUNDED in Atlanta

My father remembered a training flight from his time at Smyrna where, because of bad weather ahead of them, he, as pilot, made the command decision to set down at an airfield in Atlanta and spend the night with his grandparents. From looking at his flight record for March, I believe that happened on March 19th.

The Smyrna – Cochran (Georgia) – Smyrna round-trip on that day took them right over Atlanta and the flight record shows they flew from Atlanta to Smyrna on the 20th with no indication of how they got to Atlanta.

From Newspapers.com, I was able to confirm there were severe afternoon and evening thunderstorms on the 19th in the Nashville/Smyrna area. After landing at an airfield in Atlanta, my father called his grandparents who came and picked up the “boys” and took them home for the evening.

In the following letter, 2nd Lt. Parks’ grandmother, Jennie Walton refers to the event. It is a little over a month later and she is still greatly troubled that she was not better prepared for her grandson’s surprise visit.

*April 28th, 1943 – Letter from 2nd Lt. Parks’ grandmother, Jennie Walton in Atlanta.*

NEW GEAR

*March 28th, 1943 – Just before leaving Smyrna, 2nd Lt. Parks was issued leather fleece-lined flight gear that indicated they were about to begin flying at higher altitudes than they had to date.*

The B-2 Flight Cap, B-3 Flying Trousers, and A-3 Flying Jacket pictured above are examples of the gear that 2nd Lt. Parks and his fellow pilots were issued at the end of March 1943 just before moving to Lockbourne Army Airbase in Ohio.

Lockbourne Army Air Base – Columbus, Ohio

On Monday, March 29th, the pilots were transferred from Smyrna, Tennessee to Lockbourne Army Airbase for more of the same… Day and night flying, takeoffs and landings, Link Trainer sessions, and ground school.

In addition to flight time, the Army Air Force also tracked how many landings a trainee made in each flying session.

Before arriving at Lockbourne, the most landings my father had made in one session were ten and he had done that by making a landing every 15 minutes over the course of two and a half hours.

The following flight record for 2nd Lt. Parks’ time at Lockbourne indicates that during his first flight session on his first day of flying at Lockbourne, he made fourteen landings in thirty-five minutes… first as pilot and then as co-pilot… that’s a take-off and landing every 2.5 minutes for 35 minutes… twice.

I assume these were what is called “touch-and-go” landings… Upon landing, as soon as the B-17’s wheels touched the runway, the pilot would apply full power and take off again. The co-pilot would re-set the flaps for flight and raise the landing gear as the pilot gained altitude and turned on a downwind leg to get in position to land again. Once they reached an altitude of 500 or 1000 feet, the pilot would turn on a short base leg and then quickly turn for an approach. As the pilot lined up on the runway, the co-pilot would adjust flaps for landing and lower the gear. Once the bomber’s wheels touched the runway… Full power… And the process started all over again. It would have been a very busy and stressful thirty-five minutes for the young pilots… And, to add to the pressure, it looks like they were being observed by Capt. Catton.

Welcome to Lockbourne.

*2nd Lt. Parks Flight Record for April 1943 while at Lockbourne Army Air Base in Columbus, Ohio.*

Paperwork

Leaving Lockbourne Army Air Base at the end of April generated a blizzard of paperwork. What follows is a sample.

*April 30th, 1943. Lockbourne Army Airbase. Twenty-five-year-old Capt. Thomas A. Fydell gives twenty-one-year-old 2nd Lt. Thomas A. Parks his final B-17 certification flight.*

April 29th, 1943 – This document provides a possible explanation for why Gordon Hendricksen wasn’t mentioned in my father’s letter to his pal, Russ Dougherty about the fates of their mutual friends. Everything in the Army Air Force was done in alphabetical order and “Hendricksen” and” Parks” were simply in a different part of the alphabet. Dad’s close friends were Love, Marks, McDowell, Mouat, Nettles, Obenschain, O’Dell, and Scarborough… All of those names are within three letters of “Parks”. “Hendricksen” was seven letters away. Alphabetically speaking… that is an entirely different neighborhood.

April 30, 1943. Final Clearance… In all, 20 different people had to sign this piece of paper confirming that 2nd Lt. Parks wasn’t leaving Lockbourne AAB owing the United State Government any money. Oddly, the Lieutenant was allowed to use his own signature for six of the organizations… including the Ordnance Department…

*April 30, 1943 – In those days, almost everyone traveled long distance by train. 2nd Lt. Parks would take a train* home to Washington D.C., spend a week with his parents, and then head back across the *country for the 3-5 day trip to Moses Lake, Washington. As I read this, his government travel allowance would have been “approximately $104.25”*

May 1st, 1943 – Special Orders 121 – Along with pilots from my father’s early training days already mentioned, new names become part of his story. 2nd Lieutenants O’Dell, Nettles, Scarborough, and Obenschain who did their early training at different bases than my father, will also end up in England at the 96th Bomb Group. There, Nettles and Scarborough and the 3 other officers from each of their crews will share the same 12-man Quonset hut with 2nd Lt. Parks and the officers from his crew. They would become very close friends.

LAST VISIT HOME

On May 1st, 1943, 2nd Lt. Parks and his fellow pilots finally got the leave they had been anticipating since February… a total of 14 days. During that time my father would travel to Washington D.C., visit his parents, and then travel back across the country to Moses Lake, Washington… By train. He had to report for duty on May 15th… no later than nine o’clock in the morning.

For some, this leave would be the last time they would ever see their families.

*Sunday*, *May 10, 1943. Lt. Parks and his mother, Virginia standing in front of the Bartholdi Fountain at the National Botanic Gardens in Washington D.C.*

*May 10, 1943. Thomas A. Parks Jr. and Sr. at the National Botanic Gardens.*

*The first week of May 1943 –* *This portrait was taken at the *Palais Royal Photography Studio* in Washington D.C. sometime during 2nd Lt. Parks’ visit with his parents. His mother wrote on the back…* “*Last leave home before going overseas – May 1943″*

NEXT: Learning the Art of War: Episode 7: Crew Training, Girls, and the Hoarder

Author

Tom Parks

At the beginning of February 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad was coming to its cataclysmic conclusion. After a little over five months of fighting in and around the great city, over two million people were dead, wounded, or missing. In the end, ninety-one thousand German soldiers surrendered to the Russians. Only five thousand survived their captivity.

The Third Reich had been on a four-and-a-half-year winning streak. They had not suffered a serious defeat since invading Poland on the first of September, 1939. The Russians’ successful defense of Stalingrad was big news.

On the 1st of February, the Independent Record in Helena, Montana ran a seven-column headline: “Germans at Stalingrad Wiped Out”. In Lumberton, North Carolina, The Robeson used eight columns to announce: “Death Blows Hitting Trapped Nazis”. My personal favorite came from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The boldface, all cap, banner headline in the Telegraph is an almost perfect horror movie elevator pitch:

I say the headline is an “almost” perfect pitch, only because, there is no way movie zombies could match the true horror of what actually happened at Stalingrad.

Columbus, Mississippi

As the surviving Germans surrendered on the Volga, aviation Cadet Thomas A. Parks, was at the Army Flying School in Columbus, Mississippi finishing his twin-engine flight training.

He had enlisted the previous March in Washington, DC. On April 10th, 1942, he had boarded a train bound for Montgomery, Alabama. Over the next three months, he had learned how to march and who to salute and what a five-mile run in Alabama in the middle of summer felt like.

In August of 1942, my father and the rest of the cadets that made up the class of 43B went to Arcadia, Florida to learn how to fly single-engine bi-planes. Two months later, they moved to Bainbridge, Georgia to learn to fly a bigger single-engine aircraft. Two months after that, they were in Columbus learning to fly still bigger airplanes.

The Advanced Trainers cadets flew at Columbus – **Columbus Graduation Booklet**

Now, after ten months in the Army Air Corps, Cadet Parks was about to officially become a pilot and be promoted to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. Enlisted men and non-commissioned officers would now be required to throw him a salute. He was looking forward to that.

His buddy, Russ Dougherty, was still in Bainbridge, Georgia finishing his primary flight training. He had been held back because, right before Christmas, Russ had had to take family leave when his father suddenly died.

Reunited

At the end of January 1943, Russ wrote to my father from Bainbridge:

**January 20th, 1943** – Early texting – Russ Dougherty informs my father that he, Kelly Ritter, and Charlie King would be arriving from Bainbridge, Georgia the following Wednesday. Note that military personnel did not need postage on their letters – **Russ Dougherty Letter to Thomas A. Parks**

In his two-line message, Russ mentions that Kelly Ritter and Charlie King would be coming with him. Only one of those three cadets would see combat.

Russ Dougherty became a flight instructor and Charlie King was assigned to a Ferrying Group that flew new warplanes out of Nashville to points of embarkation in the United States.

Kelly Ritter

Lt. Ritter, from North Carolina, wound up flying B-24 Liberators with the 93rd Bomb Group out of Hardwick, England.

On February 4th, 1944, the Ritter crew was headed for Frankfurt, Germany. This required the Americans to fly through the Ruhr Valley. Heavily industrialized, the Ruhr was one of the most closely defended regions of the Nazi homeland. An hour before the target, German anti-aircraft fire took out the #4 engine on Ritter’s B-24.

With his bomber losing altitude and too badly damaged to limp home, Ritter’s asked his navigator, 1st Lt. Edwin “Ed” Whitefield, to give him a heading for neutral Switzerland.

Like his pilot, Whitefield was also from North Carolina. He grew up in Durham and had dreamed of flying since high school. High over Germany, Ed quickly plotted a course southward toward Switzerland and safety, a little over two hundred miles away. The stricken bomber covered less than fifty.

Their plane was on fire when Lt. Kelly order his men to bail out. All ten members of the Ritter crew parachuted safely from the bomber. Nine were taken prisoner by German forces. Upon landing, twenty-five-year-old Ed Whitefield, was surrounded and beaten to death by enraged civilians.

**1936 – Durham High School** – Edwin Whitefield’s senior yearbook picture. Even then, Ed was thinking about flying. It is likely his need for glasses prevented him from becoming a pilot but that didn’t stop him from becoming an airman – **DHS Yearbook/Ancestry.com**

Three weeks later, toward the end of February, Whitefield’s wife, Vera, got a telegram from the Secretary of War expressing his regret to inform her that Ed was missing in action. It would be more than a year before Vera would receive the news that her husband was dead.

The surviving members of the Ritter crew were taken to the interrogation camp at Oberursel, a suburb of Frankfurt, the city they had intended to bomb. A few weeks later, Lt. Kelly Ritter was moved to Stalag Luft I, where he reunited with my father. It had been a little over a year since they got together with Russ Dougherty and Charlie King to celebrate my father’s graduation from flying school.

On the 26th of January, 1943, the day Dougherty, Ritter, and King arrived in Columbus, Cadet Parks wrote his mother about his impending graduation:

“Dear Folks ~

Three weeks from today! Doesn’t seem possible. Russ got here today and I was really glad to see him. Haven’t had a chance to talk to him much yet though.

Started our navigation flights this week. Went to Memphis Sunday afternoon, Meridian (Mississippi) yesterday. Probably go up to Nashville sometime this week. Night flying starts next week.” Letter to his Parents – January 26th, 1943

**January 26, 1943** – Letter from Cadet Parks to his parents.

Orders

The following document contains the names of all 225 young men who graduated with my father on February 16, 1943.

Report Card

*Apparently, Identifying Naval Vessels was a problem for dad.*

Graduation – February 16th of February, 1943

The week before his mother arrived to see the ceremony, my father wrote:

“…I had to get you a room in a private home in town. The hotel was sold out a week after we got here and I didn’t know in time whether you would be here. However I’m sure you will like the arrangements I did make. Almost 300 homes in town give their names to the USO who arranges accommodations during graduation week since the hotels are so inadequate.” – Letter to his mother – February 8th, 1943

War rationing had made heating oil hard to come by that winter and on graduation day, the East Coast was in the grip of a cold wave that had swept out of New England the day before killing twenty-six people and damaging crops as far south as the Everglades. On graduation day, temperatures in Mississippi barely reached the 40s.

The ceremony was held in the main hangar at the airbase. The structure would have offered some protection from the wind but it was cold.

Columbus was full of families who had traveled long distances to witness their sons, brothers, fiancees, and husbands become 2nd Lieutenants and United States Army Corps pilots.

**February 12, 1943** – Cadet Leslie Meikleham’s family and his fiancee announce their intention of traveling from New Jersey to Columbus, Mississippi for the graduation ceremony – **Time Record**

Cadet Rockwell Keeney one-upped Cadet Meikleham by marrying his fiancee right after the graduation ceremony – **Hartford Courant**

At 10:30 in the morning the post chaplain, J.B. Wilford, gave the invocation.

**February 16th, 1943** – Graduation program – **Columbus Army Flight School**

The graduation program lists Mr. Birney Imes as the commencement speaker. Birney, it turns out, was a big part of the reason cadets were training in Columbus.

Imes owned the local newspaper, The Commercial Dispatch, and, in 1940, he was the chairman of the Columbus Airbase Commission. A full year before Pearl Harbor, this group of local businessmen saw the writing on the wall and convinced the Army to build an airbase in their town. It’s Economics 101, War may be hell but it is also very good for business.

And business was good. The airbase opened on January 25th, 1942. It had been graduating a class a month ever since. This would be the base’s eleventh commencement ceremony and the 225 surviving cadets of 43B comprised one of the largest classes to graduate to date.

The picture of 2nd Lieutenant Parks at the opening of this post was taken a local photography studio in Columbus to celebrate his graduation. Every member of his class got their picture taken. A couple of hundred pictures every month would have been big business in 1943. The young cadets also needed Cokes and socks and movies and burgers and cigarettes and beer and… everything.

Birney Imes spoke at the base’s second commencement and, now, he had been asked to speak again. To that point, he was the only person who had been accorded that honor twice. We don’t know exactly what Mr. Imes told the cadets that day but it was probably along the lines of what another class later that year would hear from its commencement speaker when he told them that, “…there is great satisfaction in the knowledge of being privileged to fight for the upholding of a free people and a free world.“

The Old Magnolia State

In January of 1943, while my father was in Columbus preparing to fight for “free people” and a “free world”, Federal Government prosecutors were 180 miles away in Hattiesburg, indicting five white Mississippians for depriving Howard Wash, a black Mississippian, of his civil rights

In October of the previous year, a jury had found Mr. Wash, the 49-year-old father of eight, guilty for the killing of Clint Welborn, Wash’s employer of eight years.

During the trial, testimony indicated that Mr. Welborn, a “dairyman“, was put out when his employee, Mr. Wash, arrived “late for his chores“. While “reprimanding” Wash (apparently with a shovel), Howard picked up a milk bucket and killed his boss.

Wash claimed self-defense. The all-white jury sentenced him to life in prison for unpremeditated murder.

The local community was outraged at the leniency of a life sentence and so, on the night of October 17, 1942, a mob of between 50 to 100 people dragged Mr. Wash from his jail cell, took him to a nearby railroad bridge, and lynched him

Now, as my father prepared for graduation, the Federal Government was bringing five men to trial on charges of inciting a lynch mob.

It was big news around the country. In the 42 years since the turn of the previous century, there had been 572 lynchings in Mississippi alone. The same week Howard Wash was killed, white Mississippians lynched, Charlie Lang and Ernest Green, both black and both fourteen.

The Hattiesburg trial in early 1943 was only the second time since 1903 the U.S. Government had attempted to prosecute the perpetrators of a lynching using the due process and equal protection under the law guarantees contained in the United States Constitution.

According to the St. Louis Star-Times, it was the prevailing opinion in Hattiesburg, before the Federal trial began that, “…you’ll never convict a white man in Mississippi of lynching a Negro“. It took fifteen minutes for twelve white jurors to confirm that opinion.

According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch of April 24th, 1943, during his final summation, defense Attorney Andy Scott stated, “These gentlemen (the Federal Prosecutors) seem to have forgotten that the south will remain where it is so far as white supremacy is concerned until Gabriel blows his horn. The Anglo-Saxon bloodstream must remain pure.“

In the same article, defense attorney, Ed Franklin, from Jackson, Mississippi, is described as giving an improvised address that at times could be heard a block from the courthouse.

Franklin thundered to the jury that, “Social equality” was the guts of the case and that it constituted one of the guiding principals of the Communist Party in this country.

“Negroes and whites“, Franklin roared in closing, “understand one another in Mississippi and social and political equality is out of the question in the Old Magnolia State“.

Upholding a Free People

During World War II, black Americans, while only 9% of the U.S. population, contributed over 16% of all volunteers for military service.

In January of 1944, one month after my father became a prisoner of war, William E. Griffin, a black fighter pilot and one of the famous Tuskeegee Airmen, joined the ranks of Allied servicemen being held at Stalag I.

But, in February of 1943, that particular unpleasantness was still somewhere off in my father’s dim and distant future. Right now, he was an Army Air Force pilot and a brand new 2nd Lieutenant. “Yipee” indeed.

Thomas A. Parks, Jr. (Middle Row – 4th from the right) – **Columbus Graduation Booklet**

“Off we go, into the wild blue yonder… Flying high, into the sun…”

NEXT: Learning the Art of War: Episode 6: Transition Training

Author

Tom Parks

I’ve known Sam McMurray for twenty years. I’ve been a fan a lot longer than that.

From Kojak and The Jeffersons in the ’70s to Moonlighting and Raising Arizona in the ’80s… From The Simpsons, The Tracy Ullman Show, Pinky and the Brain, and Johnny Bravo in the 90’s to Friends and Breaking Bad in the 2000’s to Grey’s Anatomy and Devious Maids in this decade… Sam has done a lot of great acting. Check him out on IMDB.

These days, he and I are part of a ragtag group of actors, writers, producers, directors, and miscellaneous other members of Hollywood’s unsteadily employed who regularly get together to play golf and complain about the things men our age complain about. Which is pretty much everything.

Author

Tom Parks

1943

On January 1st, Cadet Parks awoke with a sense of excitement about the new year. He was beginning his third week of advanced flight training and the goal was in sight. In forty-five days, he would graduate as a Second Lieutenant and an Army Air Force pilot.

Just fifteen days before, my father had finished basic flight training and departed Bainbridge, Georgia bound for his present assignment at the Army Advanced Flight School at Columbus, Mississippi. Five days after reporting for duty, he celebrated his twenty-first birthday.

A milestone birthday, then Christmas, then New Year’s, and now a bunch of cross country flying in twin-engine trainers… As far as my father was concerned, life just didn’t get much better.

*July 2004 – My father reflects on Columbus*

In spite of the horror raging across Europe and in the Pacific, for Cadet Parks, war was still an elusively abstract concept.

The aircraft he had flown so far were not instruments of war. They were benign creatures with no combat capabilities, only harmful to the men who flew them. To date, the young aviator’s training was almost entirely focused on how to get a plane in the air and back on the ground without killing anyone.

Sure, they had learned how to fire a .45 handgun and there was some skeet shooting with shotguns to teach them how to lead a moving target but, hell, that stuff was fun.

In his letters to his mother, more than once, Cadet Parks ends long descriptions of how arduous his training is with those exact words. It’s tough… “But, it’s fun.“

The fun wasn’t going to last much longer.

By the time my father’s next birthday rolled around, many of his friends would be dead or missing in action and he would be a prisoner of war deep inside Hitler’s Third Reich.

They Were Friends

The cadets of class 43-B had been training together since April of 1942. Over the ensuing eight months, many friendships developed. After Bainbridge, the friends began heading in different directions.

Bomber pilots went to multi-engine advanced training at bases like the one Cadet Parks went to in Columbus, Mississippi. Trainees destined to fly fighters went to single-engine advanced schools. My father’s pal and future fighter pilot, J.P. O’Reagan, ended up in Marianna, Florida.

John Patrick “Pat” O’Reagan was born in Kansas in 1921. Sometime in the 1930s, Pat’s father packed up the family and moved to Washington D.C . where the senior O’Reagan got a job at the Washington Navy Yard.

On March 26th, 1942, three weeks after his twenty-first birthday, Pat, the oldest of the three O’Reagan sons, enlisted in the Army Air Force at Bolling Field in the District of Columbia.

Two weeks later, on Friday, April 10th, Pat joined my father and almost two hundred other brand new aviation cadets as they boarded a train headed for Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama.

Cadets O’Reagan and Parks went through pre-flight, primary flight, and basic flight training together. Now they were going their separate ways.

Eleven days after leaving Bainbridge, Pat wrote my father from Marianna.

*December 28, 1942 – Aviation Cadet J.P. O’Reagan writes to “Tap” (It was Thomas A. Parks’ initials. All my father’s friends during the war called him “Tap”)*

After his training, Pat was sent to Italy. There, Lt. O’Reagan flew over 100 combat missions in a P-51 Mustang.

He survived the war.

Near the end of Pat’s letter to my father, he mentions several of their mutual friends:

“How is Joe Gay, Carey, Ruhl and all the bunch? Tell Freemole, Ross, Etaugh, and Armstrong that P/O Thomas was asking about them. He saw Colville in Bainbridge over Xmas and asked about all of us.” December 28, 1942 – O’Reagan Letter to Cadet T.A. Parks

There are nine names in those three sentences. With the exception of P/O Thomas, they knew one another for eight months, from April to December of 1942. They trained together at Maxwell Field, Carlstrom Field, and Bainbridge Field.

“Joe Gay”

*2nd Lt. Gay February 16, 1943, Advanced Flight Graduation*

Joseph M. Gay was born in North Carolina. My father fondly remembered his friend as a tall “southern boy” who played piano and knew all the popular songs of the day.

Sometime in the 1930s, Joe’s father moved the family from North Carolina to the nation’s capital and, like Pat O’Reagan’s father, got a job at the Washington Navy Yard. He was a machinist.

Joe had finished a year of college when he enlisted in Washington the same week my father and Pat O’Reagan did.

During their time together, my father and Joe became close friends.

Their mothers both lived in the Washington area and by the time their sons graduated, the women had also become close. My grandmother got Mrs. Gay a job with her at the Fort Washington PX and, in February of 1943, they took the train from Washington to Columbus to see their boys get their wings.

After graduation, Joe and my father went to different training bases in the States to learn to fly B-17s. The next time they would see one another would be eight months later, in England.

Lt. Gay ended up flying with the 306th Bomb Group out of Thurleigh. Lt. Parks flew with the 96th Bomb Group out of Snetterton Heath. Their bases were sixty miles apart.

The two got together at least once in England before Lt. Parks and his crew were shot down on November 29th, 1943.

When Mrs. Gay heard the news that her friend’s son was missing in action, she thoughtlessly told my grandmother, “That will never happen to my Joe because he’s too smart.”

For my grandmother, the implication that her son got himself shot down because he wasn’t smart enough to prevent it, stung. But, she held her tongue. She understood a mother’s desperate need for something to hold on to… Some reason to believe her child would come home unscathed… Some way to shield herself from the inescapable fact that, in war, death was tragically random and capricious.

So, Mrs. Gay’s friend let the comment slide. However, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother in her later years and I had listened to this particular story more than once… Way more than once. I can assure you… She may not have said anything to Joe’s mother at the time but… she never got over the hurt that comment caused.

As it turned out, it was a good thing grandmother didn’t share her feelings with Mrs. Gay.

On February 25, 1944, almost three months after Lt. Parks went down over Bremen, the 8th Air Force dispatched 268 B-17s to strike German industrial facilities at Augsburg and Stuttgart.

When Lt. Joe Gay and the 306th took off that morning, they had been assigned the more distant of the two targets, the German military aircraft factories at Augsburg.

It was around noon, over Charleville, France, when enemy fighters began slashing through the American bomber formation. Augsburg was still two hours and 300 miles away.

About ten minutes after the attack began, several fighters focused on Joe’s B-17. The Flying Fortress got hit hard.

According to a surviving crew member, “Lt. Gay gave the order to bail out when the #4 engine burst into flames. His voice was loud and clear and he didn’t seem to be hurt.” Missing Air Crew Report – Aircraft 42-30728

The fire was bad. Only six of the ten members of Joe’s crew managed to bail out before the bomber exploded in mid-air. Lt. Gay and his co-pilot, Lt. Ira Gordon, died at their posts.

**Death of a Fort** – Unidentified B-17 in flames and losing a wing – USAF Photo

It would be almost a year and a half before Joe’s mother received confirmation of his death. During that awful time, my grandmother was Mrs. Gay’s faithful, constant, and comforting companion.

A Late-Breaking Odd Coincidence: On Christmas eve, 2016, as I wrote about Lt. Gay’s last mission, 54,000 German citizens had to evacuate their homes because of the discovery of an unexploded 3000 pound, WWII era bomb dropped on their city more than 70 years ago.

The bomb was found in Augsburg, Joe Gay’s destination that awful day in late February of 1944.

“Carey”

Daniel Henderick Carey grew up in Queens. The twenty-two-year-old had finished a year of college when he enlisted in Washington D.C. in March of 1942.

Eleven months later, Carey and my father graduated from advanced flight training and became Second Lieutenants.

By late September of 1943, Carey was in England with Joe Gay at the 306th Bomb Group at Thurleigh.

On Thursday, October 14th, 1943 the 8th Air Force sent 291 heavy bombers to destroy the German ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt. It was a disaster. Sixty B-17s and the 600 men flying in them did not return to England that day.

Entire books have been written about the tragic “Black Thursday” mission so, I will only detail the particulars of two participants.

My father and his crew flew to Schweinfurt and back almost without incident. Apart from being dangerously low on fuel on their return and having to land at the first airbase they encountered once they crossed the channel, it was just another mission.

His friend from Brooklyn was not as fortunate.

That day, Lt. Carey was flying as co-pilot with, what he called, a “bastard crew“.

To get as many bombers as possible to a target, bastard crews were assembled using spare planes, newly arrived personnel, and miscellaneous members of experienced crews. Flying into combat with a bastard crew meant the success of the mission and your survival depended upon men you had only met that morning as you boarded your assigned bomber.

After reading Carey’s official post-war report on the Schweinfurt raid, I suspect he was a command pilot who, for this mission, had been assigned to fly second-in-command to 1st Lt. John Jackson. In Carey’s report, discussing the fate of one of the waist gunners, he states, “Sgt. Elza McQuithy was a member of my crew and flew with me in this bastard crew for the day“. Missing Air Crew Report – Aircraft 42-30710

For official purposes, crews belonged to their pilots. The men who flew with my father were members of the “Parks’ crew“. Because Carey used the possessive in the report, referring to the waist gunner, McQuithy as, “a member of my crew“, I feel, on that terrible day, Carey was probably a first pilot flying in the right seat as Jackson’s co-pilot.

The morning of the 14th, the 8th Air Force Bomb Groups took off from their respective bases, formed up over the English coast, then headed east across the North Sea towards occupied Europe.

Because the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt were extremely important to the Nazi war effort, they were heavily defended. Enemy fighters harassed the American formation on the way to the target and all the way back to the coast.

At 2:15, just ten minutes before turning on their bomb run, the Jackson B-17 was hit. On fire and still under attack, the pilot ordered his crew to abandon ship.

In the middle of the plane, several enlisted men struggled in vain to open the jammed waist exit door. Only two of the five crew members in the back half of the bomber managed to bail out. Sgt. McQuithy, Carey’s gunner, went down with the plane.

The numbers were better for the five men in the front of the B-17. Three officers and one enlisted man exited the aircraft.

Lt. Jackson, the pilot, stayed at the controls keeping the ship steady as airmen scrambled to bail out. He died with the three other members of the bastard crew who were still aboard when their bomber exploded.

Carey wrote of the twenty-two-year-old pilot, “He went beyond the point of bravery in holding for time“. Missing Air Crew Report – Aircraft 42-30710

Of the six men who successfully escaped the bomber, only five survived. The crew’s twenty-three-year-old navigator was fatally injured by his parachute harness when the chute opened.

War, in general, is a seemingly endless, swirling shit storm of cruel tragedies. However, this one stands out as especially cruel because it was so easily avoidable. As Lt. Carey bitterly explained in his report…

“This man met his death due to parachute harness not being adjusted & secured. He was never given ample time to rig his gear in England. He was in the outfit five days and was on his fourth mission… He died on his way to a German hospital from internal injuries…” Missing Air Crew Report – Aircraft 42-30710

Lt. Carey was captured as soon as he reached the ground. Eight months after graduating from Advanced Flight training in Columbus, Mississippi, my father’s friend was a prisoner of war.

“Ruhl”

Frederick Christian Ruhl grew up in Pittsburgh. His father worked for the city as a clerk. Fred worked in the same capacity for the Public Utilities.

A month after Pearl Harbor, Fred quit the Public Utilities’ job and joined the Army Air Force as an aviation cadet. He was sent to Maxwell Field in Alabama for pre-flight training.

It was there Cadet Ruhl and Cadet Parks became friends.

After graduation at Columbus, Mississippi, both Second Lieutenants were assigned B-17 transition training. 2nd Lt. Parks went to Smyrna, Tennessee. 2nd Lt. Ruhl went to Blythe Army Airfield in California.

The first clue I had that something had gone wrong in Blythe was in a letter my father wrote his mother in March of 1943, exactly a month after he and Ruhl left Columbus.

“I was shocked to hear about Fred. I know what a blow it was to his mother right after visiting with him. It doesn’t seem possible that it could happen to someone you’ve been so closely associated with. We were very lucky to have so few accidents during our training.” Letter to his Parents – March 16th, 1943

Frederick Ruhl was only the “Fred” in his class. Searching for his name in newspapers printed from February 16th to March 16th, 1943 turned up the story.

On March 4th, sixteen days after leaving Columbus, Fred Ruhl, an instructor, and three other trainees left Blythe in a B-17 on a routine night flying exercise.

They took off at 7:20 in the evening and were due back at midnight. Training flights were supposed to stay within fifty miles of the base. Somehow, Ruhl’s B-17 ended up 200 miles to the northeast over Flagstaff, Arizona.

It was a clear night at Blythe. At Flagstaff, it was cloudy and snowing. The bomber crew was lost and running out of fuel. At 1:45 in the morning, while circling and looking for a place to land, they flew into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

*The box indicates the 50 mile training range the B-17 should have stayed within. The dotted line to the northwest shows how far the crew strayed and where they crashed.*

The picture at the top of this story, above the title, is my father’s radio range reference card for Columbus, Mississippi. Starting in the 1930s, there was a network of radio transmitters across the country which aviators used as navigation beacons.

The card shows the location of the beacon for Columbus (the circle at the center), as well as the location of the city of Columbus and the Columbus Advanced Flight School (CAFS) in relation to the beacon.

Because the night was so clear over Blythe, investigators suspected the crew picked up the signal from the beacon at Winslow, Arizona and, mistaking it for the Blythe beacon, flew in the wrong direction. By the time the five young airmen got to Flagstaff, lack of fuel and bad weather sealed their fate.

Fred Ruhl was the first of my father’s friends to die. He had been twenty-three years old for eight days.

“Freemole”

Maynard C. Freemole grew up in South Dakota. He quit high school after the 10th grade and on February 10th, 1941, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Army. Maynard was seventeen.

When America joined the war, Freemole applied for pilot training and was sent to Maxwell Field in Alabama.

Not having completed high school put the teenager at a severe disadvantage during pilot training. However, Maynard bore down, beat the odds, and graduated with my father from twin-engine advanced in February of 1943.

Freemole and my father did their B-17 transition training at different locations in the States. However…

Seven months later, on September 25th, 1943, 2nd Lt. Parks and his crew arrived at the 96th Bomb Group’s base at Snetterton Heath and were assigned to the 337th Squadron. Three days later, 2nd Lt. Freemole arrived at the same base and was assigned the same squadron.

They flew combat missions together until November 29th, 1943. That day, the 96th Bomb Group flew their second mission to Bremen, Germany in three days.

Over the target, immediately after bombardier, Joseph LeBlanc announced “bombs away“, the Parks’ B-17 was hit by anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighters. The rest of this story is told elsewhere in this blog, however, before the sun went down that day, Lt. Parks and his crew were prisoners of war.

A little over two weeks later, on December 16th, the 8th Air Force decided the German naval installation at Bremen needed even more bombing. It is entirely possible this was the Freemole crew’s third trip to this target in less than three weeks.

That morning, over 500 B-17s and B-24s from various bomb groups based all over the part of England commonly known as East Anglia, headed for Germany.

By two o’clock in the afternoon, they had hit their assigned objective. Now, under constant attack by enemy fighters, the beleaguered bombers were battling their way back towards the North Sea and home.

Near the Dutch coast, two B-17s from the 96th Bomb Group’s 337th Squadron were shot from the sky. Lt. Edwin Smith’s plane exploded in mid-air before anyone could bailout. Lt. Freemole’s plane went down in flames. There were no survivors.

The demise of the two bombers came so suddenly and simultaneously that they crashed very close to one another near the tiny village of Poppenwier. The remains of the ten airmen of the Smith crew and the ten from the Freemole crew were buried in common graves in the village cemetery.

Maynard Freemole was three months shy of his 21st birthday.

After taking off from Snetterton, bombers from the 96th Bomb Group flew northwest and assembled with B-17s from other bomb groups just off the coast of England. Then they flew northeast across the North Sea. Turning south, they hit Bremen and turned for home. Freemole’s plane went down near the village of Poppenweir.

In November of 1949, Lt. Freemole’s remains and those of several of his crew were returned to the United States. They are buried in a common grave at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

“Ross”

Max Ross was a grocery clerk from Iowa.

In 1940, grocery clerking in Iowa paid $700 a year. That may be one of the reasons that, in February 1941, ten months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the twenty-two-year-old high school graduate enlisted in the Army.

After America entered the war, the call went out for pilots and Max signed up.

Ross and my father met during pre-flight training at Maxwell Field. Eleven months later, after graduating from twin-engine Advanced at Columbus, dad went on to fly B-17s. Second Lt. Ross was assigned to fly B-24 Liberators.

Max ended up in the Pacific Theater of Operations flying combat missions with the 380th Bomb Group out of Australia.

He survived the war.

“Etaugh”

Howard Alfred Etaugh grew up in Peoria, the son of a watchman at a tractor factory.

Etaugh enlisted in the Army Air Force in Washington D.C . the same week my father did. After getting their commissions, 2nd Lt. Parks flew B-17 Flying Fortresses. 2nd Lt. Etaugh, like Lt. Max Ross, was assigned, B-24 Liberators.

In March of 1944, just before going overseas, Howard got a leave from Selman Field in Monroe, Louisiana and traveled to St. Louis, Missouri to marry lovely Alice Tiemann.

After the wedding, the groom headed for Italy to fly with the 15th Air Force.

On October 13th, six months after Howard married Alice, the 15th sent more than 650 heavy bombers to hit targets in Hungary.

For those of you who put stock in this kind of thing, that year, October 13th fell on a Friday.

*1940s – Consolidated B-24 Liberator over Maxwell Field Alabama – USAF Photo*

2nd Lt. Etaugh was co-pilot on the crew of Lt. Samuel Winfree. They flew with the 454th Bomb Group out of an airfield at San Giovanni, Italy.

Sometime after midnight on the 13th, the operations room at the 454th got word that a mission was on and their group was going.

Orderlies woke the bomber crews well before dawn for breakfast and briefings. They were going to need to take off early. Their target was 400 miles to the northeast and the planners wanted them to drop their bombs before noon.

Like B-17s, B-24s usually flew with a ten-man crew. For some reason, on this mission, the Winfree crew flew without a navigator. There is no explanation, all we know is, the bomber departed San Giovanni with nine souls onboard instead of ten.

At the appointed time, the B-24s took off, assembled, and headed out across the Adriatic. Their mission that day was to destroy the railroad center at Székesfehérvár, Hungry.

That’s right… Székesfehérvár. Even Hungarians think that’s too much. They refer to the city as “Fehérvár”.

No matter what you call the city, it was a bad place to be on that particular Friday.

At 11:28 in the morning, after flying 400 miles, and only one minute from their target, the Winfree B-24 was hit by flak from anti-aircraft guns defending the rail yards below. The Liberator finished its bomb run on fire.

In a post-war report on the incident, the pilot stated that, after they were hit, he and the engineer worked to extinguish flames on the flight deck and in the bomb bay. Then, at some point, Winfree, the pilot, bailed out.

Winfree wrote that, when he exited the aircraft, 2nd Lt. Etaugh was flying the plane and added, “I was told by co-pilot that he was alright and was coming behind my engineer and myself“. Missing Air Crew Report – Aircraft 42-51366

The pilot got out. His engineer and his co-pilot didn’t.

According to witnesses in other planes, shortly after the burning Liberator dropped its bombs, two parachutes were seen, then the B-24 blew up. One of the surviving waist gunners reported that he was thrown clear of the bomber by the explosion.

The pilot and two gunners floated to safety. Harold Etaugh perished with five other members of the crew. He was twenty-three.

Back in St. Louis, a year would pass before Alice got official confirmation she was a widow.

“Armstrong”

George V. Armstrong, Jr. was born in Washington, D.C. and enlisted there the same week my father did. He was twenty-three.

Like many aviation cadets, George entered the service with just a high school diploma. However, unlike most cadets, when he enlisted, he was married. In fact, when George signed up to go off to war, he was not only married, he and his wife, Elizabeth, had two very young children.

On February 16, 1943, ten months after leaving Elizabeth and the kids in Washington, George Armstrong and my father became Second Lieutenants. The next day, 2nd Lt. Parks went to Smyrna, Tennessee and 2nd Lt. Armstrong went to Selman Field in Monroe, Louisiana.

According to Armstrong’s obituary in 2014, Monroe is where George met and married, “my Mattie“, the “love of his life“.

Armstrong served Stateside. He survived both the war and explaining his Mattie to his Elizabeth.

“P/O Thomas”

P/O Thomas was probably a Royal Air Force Pilot Officer. During WWII, not only did many British aviation cadets train in the United States, RAF veteran pilots came to America to train our cadets. Most likely, P/O Thomas was an instructor at Bainbridge.

My father fondly remembered the RAF cadets and instructors as gentlemen who were as brave as they were unfailingly polite. He liked them a lot.

“Colville”

Leonard R. Colville was born in Tennessee. After high school, Leonard went to work as an “office boy” for the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army.

After America entered the war, Leonard signed up for pilot training. He met my father at Maxwell Field.

There is no picture for Colville because he was not among the cadets who graduated from advanced twin-engine training at Columbus, Mississippi.

However, somewhere along the line, he did become 2nd Lt. Colville. He also got a multi-engine rating because he ended up in the China-Burma-India theater flying as co-pilot of a C-47 transport with the 443rd Troop Carrier Group based at Dinjan, India.

The 443rd was tasked with moving troops, evacuating the wounded, and hauling a wide variety of supplies in support of the allied advance through the jungles of Burma.

Lt. Colville and the 443rd arrived at Dinjan on June 6th, 1944. Five days later, Leonard, his pilot, 2nd Lt. Fred Crawford, and their radio operator, Corporal Clarence Stowers were given a resupply mission to Burma.

That morning, their C-47 also carried a 3-man drop crew consisting of T/5 Harold Graham, T/5 Edward Hnizdor, and Cpl. Frank Plotski. It was the drop crew’s responsibility to get whatever cargo they were carrying out of the plane. On this day, they were wrangling sacks of food.

After taking off from Dinjan, the pilot headed southeast. The Burma border was fifty miles away.

The flight left early and by seven in the morning they were nearing their destination.

Ed Hnizdor described the weather as, “…good, with blue sky and sunshine“. Missing Air Crew Report – Aircraft 43-15403

Hnizdor was stretched out on sacks of food by a window in the rear of the plane. He reported the C-47 was flying at a low altitude when the pilot rapidly advanced the throttles and attempted to climb. The plane bellied into the side of a hill going upslope.

My father’s friend, twenty-four-year-old Leonard Colville, his pilot, the radioman, and two members of the drop crew died on impact. Miraculously, T/5 Ed Hnizdor survived.

Pinned in the burning wreckage by a jumble of food sacks, Hnizdor was rescued by a passing Chinese patrol.

Ed died in Chicago in 2006 of natural causes.

Ed Hnizdor reported that his Chinese rescuers carried him on a stretcher to a facility run by the 13th Medical Battalion. The 13th had a jungle hospital at Kamaing that received its supplies by airdrop. Kamaing wouldn’t have been much more than a sixty-minute flight from Dinjan so the early hour fits. The line between Dinjan and Kamaing also closely matches the compass heading on which the C-47 was flying that morning. However, this is just a guess.

Adding up the losses

Less than a year and a half after leaving Bainbridge, five of the eight American cadets mentioned in O’Reagan’s letter were dead. One was a prisoner of war… Two if you count the guy to whom the letter was written. The oldest to die was twenty-four.

But in Columbus, at the beginning of 1943, all of that misfortune was still in the future.

For now, there was navigation to learn, and twin-engine aircraft to fly, and Mississippi girls to dance with. Cadet Parks and his pals were having the time of their lives. Whenever these young aviators were out on the town, in a bar, at a USO social, or just walking down the street, it was only a matter of time before they were shoulder to shoulder, singing with joyous abandon…


Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder
At 'em boys, Give 'er the gun!
Down we dive, spouting our flame from under
Off with one helluva roar!
We live in fame or go down in flame. Hey!
Nothing can stop the Army Air Force!

This, of course, was before they started to, literally, go down in flame.

NEXT – Learning the Art of War – 5. They Wanted Wings…

*2nd Lt. Parks – February 16, 1943 – Advanced Flight Graduation*

Author

Tom Parks

A Ground School Instructor…

In August of 1942, as my father began his Primary Flight training at Carlstrom Field in Florida, J.D. Salinger, the future author of “Catcher in the Rye“, was arriving at the Army Air Force Basic Flight School at Bainbridge, Georgia. He would be stationed there for the next nine months.

The twenty-three-year-old writer had been drafted earlier that year and subsequently assigned to the Bainbridge Army Airfield as a ground school instructor.

In the biography, J.D.Salinger: A Life, author Kenneth Slawenski writes that Salinger, although “not mechanically inclined“, somehow found himself teaching young pilots the inner workings of aircraft engines.

In October of 1942, two months after Salinger became an instructor, Cadet Parks and the class of 43-B arrived at Bainbridge for their Basic Flight Training…

That’s right… There is a distinct possibility my father learned about aircraft engines from J.D. Salinger.

War is a strange business.

Author

Tom Parks

The above picture was taken at Carlstrom Field sometime in late August or early September of 1942

In the photograph, aviation cadets, Rodney L. Due (left) from Chicago, Richard B. Bixler (right) from Annville, Pennsylvania and their instructor (center) leave the flight line after putting in some time in the dual cockpit PT-17 Stearman in the background.

On the back of the photograph, my father titled the scene, “That’s enough for today.“

Author

Tom Parks

The Japanese attack on Pearl harbor took place on Sunday, December 7th, 1941. By the following Wednesday, America was formally at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy.

As the United States entered the conflict, it had 1.8 million citizens in uniform. Over the next twelve months, that number would more than double as another two million men and women enlisted or were drafted. By the end of the war, over 12 million Americans would be serving in America’s armed forces. 8.7 million of them went overseas.

My mother and father were two of the 8.7 million Americans who served on foreign shores during World War II. But, in January of 1942, they were still civilians and 5 full years away from the chance meeting my existence would depend on.

Tom Parks

During World War II, both of my parents and all three of my uncles served overseas in the United States Armed Forces. Only four of them came home.

Above, from left to right…

Author

Tom Parks

During the first two weeks of April 1942, the war news was pretty bleak.

In Europe, Adolf Hitler was planning a summer offensive against Russia’s oil fields in the Caucasus and a move to seize Stalingrad.

In the Pacific, Japan was gaining control of the Philippines and, on the 9th of April, over 60,000 Filipino and American prisoners of war began a forced relocation that is now known as The Bataan Death March.

At sea, the Japanese Navy sank the Royal Navy cruisers, HMS Cornwall and Dorsetshire, the aircraft carrier, HMS Hermes, and the Royal Australian Navy destroyer, HMAS Vampire.

September 1943

East Anglia

Snetterton Heath

The 96th Bomb Group

Thursday – September 23rd – The mission to Kerlin Bastard

Formation Flying

Sunday – September 26th

Monday – September 27th

Tuesday – September 28th , 1943 – Another Training Flight

Wednesday – September 29th, 1943

Thursday – September 30th, 1943

Friday – October 1st, 1943

Saturday – October 2nd, 1943 – First Contact

Following up on Farris and ‘Wildfire‘

COMING SOON – Practicing the Art of War: Episode 12: Black Thursday

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Graduation

Edward F. McDowell

Henry E. Marks, Jr.

November 13th, 1943 – Bremen

The Henry Marks MACR

My Best Guess

Gordon R. Hendricksen

The Hendricksen MACR

The Original Hendricksen Crew

November 29, 1943 – Bremen

In Remembrance:

Smyrna and B-17 Transition Training

Flying Over Atlanta

GROUNDED in Atlanta

NEW GEAR

Lockbourne Army Air Base – Columbus, Ohio

Paperwork

LAST VISIT HOME

NEXT: Learning the Art of War: Episode 7: Crew Training, Girls, and the Hoarder

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Columbus, Mississippi

Reunited

Kelly Ritter

Orders

Report Card

Graduation – February 16th of February, 1943

The Old Magnolia State

Upholding a Free People

NEXT: Learning the Art of War: Episode 6: Transition Training

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1943

They Were Friends

“Joe Gay”

“Carey”

“Ruhl”

“Freemole”

“Ross”

“Etaugh”

“Armstrong”

“P/O Thomas”

“Colville”

Adding up the losses

NEXT – Learning the Art of War – 5. They Wanted Wings…

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A Ground School Instructor…

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