Planes I Flew In

B17: #856 “Lady ‘V’”

September 5. 1944

Back to the gun batteries at Brest, France -- with Wegener and Bernie again. This time we dropped twelve, 500 lb. armor piercing bombs from 12,000 ft., 'with excellent results. The only dark side to the mission was that as we were turning off the target, two planes in our flight collided. No chutes were seen as they plummeted to earth.

It was while researching our records that I discovered that one of the planes in the collision was #875 (commented on earlier).

B 17: #029 “Honeychile”

September 9. 1944

Today we went to "Happy Valley" (the Ruhr Valley -- but we renamed it, "Happy Valley", for, "Flak Happy"). We bombed a plant in Düsseldorf, Germany. Had to do a 360 just before we reached the IP (initial point). Lots of flak. I saw a plane ahead of us explode. Another rough one today. My research indicates that this was my last mission with Wegener and Bernie as a team.

"Honeychile" flew a total of 12 combat missions -- from September 17 to October 14 -- the records report, "forced landing".

B 17: #???

September 17, 1944

The information in our records is not complete. It does not list all of the planes that flew this day. The 486th put up a record of 55 planes for today's mission. Some of them, flying with our sister-group, the 487th. I surmise that our plane was in that group. Because of this, I'm not sure who I flew with today. Probably with Wegener and Bernie again.

Our targets were the gun batteries at a bridge south of Rotterdam, Holland. Bombing in 6-ship formations, we dropped "frag" clusters from 1 7, 000 ft. as part of "Operation Market Garden".

I'll never forget the sight ahead of us as we turned for home. All I could see was a seemingly endless stream of planes coming from England -- C 46's and C 47's. Some were towing gliders and others were loaded with paratroopers -- all on there way to their objectives. And we silently wished them well. I later read that many of the gliders crashed on landing, killing all on board. And that the Germans opened the dikes, drowning many of our paratroopers. What a horrible way to go.

B 17: #944 "Mr. Takoma"

September 19, 1944

Today's target was to be an industrial plant in Munster, Germany. But because of the bad weather over the target area, we chose to hit a "target of opportunity" instead. It was a railroad yard on the Rhine River, just south of Koblenz, Germany.

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