I believe that this was my first mission in an all silver natural aluminum finish plane with the single black vertical stripe on the tail. The old olive painted planes were so drab, where as the aluminum bodies were so beautiful. When I started in combat, all our planes were painted the olive drab color. To me, it did not seem long in switching over to the silver. I'm sure I must have flown in formations part olive and part silver but I can't remember it today. What happened to the old painted planes I don't know. Perhaps they were lost in combat attrition or shipped out to other groups or had the paint removed. I'm sure that someone will fill me in on this point. Page 283 top right of Roger Freeman's "The Mighty Eight" give more information on this subject. I have read where the olive paint not only made the planes heavier by some hundreds of pounds but also increase air drag.

This was a straight forward mission. The sky was very clear with almost unlimited visibility. Our bombardier was Lt. John Warga who you remember was beaten so severely after drinking Brazilian whiskey while at indoctrination in Northern Ireland. He not only could hold his liquor better than any one else in our crew (and perhaps the whole squadron) but the girls seemed to fall all over themselves about him. Every crew has to have someone who can be AWOL for three days and show up one minute before roll call. Anyone else, especially me, could be AWOL one minute and miss the same roll call. Warga often came to briefing with a severe hang over. He would stay awake long enough to get his bombing instructions and reach the flight line. As soon as we took off, he could curl up in the passageway between the forward compartment and the tunnel to the rear. The forward compartment is where the front gun turret, his bomb sight and my navigation desk were located. When necessary, Warga manned the gun turret, otherwise he dozed at my feet. As we would gain altitude, the atmospheric pressure decreased until at 10,000 feet we were required to put on our oxygen masks. In the meantime, he would supply us with all the gas we could stand. The fragrance would penetrate my navigation area and go up through the maze of pipes and wires separating my desk from the pilots and co-pilots feet and fill the pilot area and back into the radio and flight engineer's room. Needless to say, we were glad to breath pure oxygen again.

How Warga could be so relaxed as we approached the target area, I'll never know. When we were close to the IP (the initial point before the target where we would begin our bomb run, usually about 15 to 30 miles before bombs away) I would kick him with my left foot and say, "Warga, wake up - we are coming to the IP." At this he would become alive. He had to be one of the best bombardiers in the Air Force, he almost never missed. The flak would be exploding all around us, I'd be a nervous wreck but not Warga, he was completely calm. He stayed alert just long enough to see the bombs hit the target and promptly relax on the floor again. Planes could be burning and exploding all around us but who cares?. Not Warga.

The truth is that he was ideally suited for his job, certainly not navigator or pilot. My pilots were also ideally selected as were our flight engineer, radio man and gunners. I had the one job that I was born to hold. I loved navigation and nothing was more enjoyable to me than my position. One could walk into a room full of air men and in a short time pick out with considerable accuracy who held what position just by observing the mannerisms of those present. Navigators were easy to sort out. Just look for a hypertensive guy, someone who can't hold still one minute, an eager beaver asking questions unrelated to the interest of everyone else. It helped to be a little odd but I loved my job.

Our enlisted men had their problems also. It seemed to me that they could not hold onto money from one pay day to the next. I gathered from what I heard that within a few days of being paid, all their money was lost in crap games or gambling of some sort. I often would loan them just enough money to get the necessities they needed from the PX, anything more would soon be gone.

Now back to the mission at hand. As we were on the bomb run to the air field at St. Troud, the flak was moderately heavy and at our altitude which was bad news. This always "scared me bad." I mentioned earlier that we were carrying 52 100 pound bombs (this was the maximum we could carry as we only had 52 bomb shackles in the bomb bay, otherwise we would have had 6000 to 8000 pounds of bombs of 500 to 2000 pounds each). Why our bombs were set to explode as soon as they left our bomb racks, I do not know. All other times the bombs had a small propeller on the nose that would unscrew as it fell through the air thereby arming the bomb on it's way down.

I was always fascinated by the sight of bombs leaving the nearby planes. We reached the drop point and the bombardiers released the bombs using an interverlometer, a device that let the bombs out one at a time. As they fell, it would appear the bombs were stacked one above the other suspended in space in a long stream, especially when they were stacked 52 high. I was looking directly at one plane when flak set off the bottom bomb. It exploded and set off the one above it which in turn set off the next higher and so on until the last exploded in or very close to the bomb bay. The plane fell out of formation and began to go down with the men bailing out. I assumed then that the plane and all the crew were lost but I recently found out by reading Will Landry's record of the 67^th squadron that the plane I saw explode that day was "Northern Lass" piloted by Lt. J. P. Ferguson who did bring the badly damaged air craft back to England and crash-landed at Attleboro. However five crew members bailed out before the plane was brought under control. All these years and to this day, I can close my eyes and see that string of 52 bombs exploding one after the other into the belly of the plane.

We landed before noon after being in the air 5 hours and 45 minutes. We still had to go through debriefing and critique which took at least two more hours. I was pretty excited over what I had seen.

Two days later on May 11th, the 492^nd Bomb Group, a new addition to the 14^th Combat Wing, flew its first mission. They were stationed at North Pickenham, 12 miles to our west. These guys had come to England as the first group ever to have the new all silver Liberators. These "Hot Pilots" prided themselves as being unusually good at formation flying. Before their combat began, we were told to watch a "fly over" by this new group so our pilots could see how it was done by "experts." Needless to say, they resented this display and said so in no uncertain terms but not loud enough for General Johnson, head of the 14^th Combat Wing to hear them.

More on the 492^nd Bomb Group later as they were headed for disaster and only lasted three months before the group was disbanded due to unacceptable combat losses.