It has taken me a long time to get around to posting these four journals, though there are only four, and the longest is two and half pages on 5x8 inch paper. I will be sharing one a day for the next four days.
I've been trying to get Dad's war materials off to places that might want to archive them-- the Love Library (love that!) at University of Nebraska, where his pilot training began and ended, the Veterans Museum at Dyersburg AFB in Halls, TN, where he got shuffled off to gunnery school and met up with Bob Ellis and others who would become his crewmates, and the 100th Bomb Group Memorial Museum in England, where he spent most of the war. That last museum, by the way, just won the "Queen's Award for Voluntary Service," and having visited it (as did Mom and Dad decades later), I can say that the staff certainly deserves the award for their welcoming attitudes and the impeccable condition the museum is in, as do all three of these institutions.
Actually, I have visited all of them and met the people who continue to preserve these places where Dad spent some very formative years. If you can't travel to them though and are interested in the 100th Bomb Group, I recommend you to their Facebook page, WWII 100th Bomb Group, and to their website, 100th Bomb Group Foundation.
I am mindful that Dad was 19 years old and that he never kept a journal before or after these four missions or about anything other than these missions.
But I am just incapable of throwing any paper away, and as one short story character once said, "There is nothing so heavy as paper." So I am lightening the load by sharing them here, not to glorify not condemn but to say, this is how it was for one 19-year- old soldier in the Army Air Corps.
No. 1 December 11, 1944 - Dad's First Mission, to Coblenz
No. 2 December 12, 1944 - Darmstadt
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