We finally flew another mission (Target: Marshalling yards at Koblenz) on December 11th, but we lost an engine over the North Sea and had to return. This time there was no mission credit and I was getting impatient with the pace of our combat tour. Boredom from sitting huddled around the stove enduring what was the coldest winter of the century in the British Isles as well as on the European continent gripped the group. As I wrote my parents many of the airmen were resorting to getting drunk at the club. Neither Frank nor I wished to resort to such a desperate remedy.

December 12th we flew in Our Gal Sal or Mason and Dixon to attack Darmstadt, a little south of Frankfurt. This was a relatively short mission and I decided to write a letter to my parents while on the mission, leaving out any information that would be potentially helpful to the enemy should the letter fall into their hands. I wrote the letter on log paper and the only data I revealed was that the temperature in the plane at bombing altitude was –38 Celsius and when the sun shone through the nose of our plane Buhse and I felt warm. We had a radio report prior to the target that Luftwaffe fighters were in the target area, but our fighters must have driven them off as we encountered none at the target. Nearing the target the clouds beneath us disappeared and we had a perfect view of the city and its rail yards below us. This was one of the rare occasions where I could watch the bombs fall all the way down to the target. I saw our bombs hit, followed by orange flashes and dense black smoke. This one was a bulls-eye! Maybe the fact there was little or no flak steadied the hands of the bombardiers. We completed the mission without incident, returning to our barracks nine and a half hours after take-off where I completed my letter begun at 11,500 feet over East Anglia while heading east.

On Sunday the 17th, Dick and I went to London again to see Connie and Dottie. I wish I could remember how we spent the day and two evenings with them, for it was the last time fate would allow us in London together. Unfortunately the fragments of the letter I wrote on the 19th do not enlighten me. I do remember that we did not get a room at the Savoy, which had been declared verboten to U.S. Military personnel because some of our esteemed colleagues had behaved like crazed bacchants and given us all a bad name with the Savoy. A train wreck on the London-Norwich rail line delayed our return to Thorpe Abbotts by seven hours and we missed dinner.

The day before our departure to London, December 16th, Hitler’s army on the border of Belgium, commanded by Field Marshall von Runstedt, surprised the Americans around St. Vith in eastern Belgium by launching a massive surprise attack using captured American tanks and other equipment in an attempt to confuse the defenders. Although the Americans were able to blunt the attack at St. Vith, the Germans succeeded in breaking through in three places south of St. Vith and in three days create a bulge in Allied lines running from Monschau east of Liege to Echternach in central Luxembourg. This was the beginning of the "Battle of the Bulge," the last major victory the enemy would enjoy and the first defeat for U.S. Forces on the Western Front. The German offensive was undertaken in extreme weather conditions that prevented Allied airpower, especially the U.S. Air Forces,  from helping to stem the initial attacks.

Finally on December 23rd the fog over Belgium lifted and the Allied Air Forces were able to attack enemy supply lines again. In the next eight days, from December 24th to the 31st my crew and I flew six missions, the most intense concentration of combat flying in our tour. On the 24th we bombed the marshalling yards at Kaiserslautern, while other 100th planes attacked airfields at Biblis, Zellhausen, and Babenhausen, all with excellent results. (The 100th sent up 62 planes on this date – the largest display of strength since beginning combat operations.) Frank Streich had his camera with him and shot thirty-six remarkable pictures, showing our formation before, during and after bombs away. On the next day, Christmas, we went back to Kaiserslautern rail yards and scored a direct hit on an ammunition train blowing it to smithereens. It was the largest explosion I had seen. This mission is referred to as one of the few "perfect missions" of the war. This according to The Story of the Century.

December 26 was "Boxing Day," which is what the British call the day they celebrate after a holiday, so having missed the Christmas party, we had our party on Boxing Day. In Switzerland Jeanne Gurtat was also celebrating. It was her twentieth birthday and she and some friends were on holiday at Pension Clement in Geneva. They had a party for her there.

On December 27th we hit the marshalling yards at Fulda with a report of "very good" results. The next day we bombed the rail yards at Koblenz, but the target was under cloud cover and our results were unknown. We encountered little flak and no enemy aircraft. There was a fatal accident among the airmen flying with Lt. G. Parsons. As the formation was returning to England via northern France, Parson’s top turret gunner, S/Sgt Charles Bodenheimer caught his glove on the turret switch while climbing out. The turret spun and crushed him to death.

We stood down on the 29th and I wrote my parents that I had a cold night in bed. The reason being that I had been asked to contribute four of my eight blankets to the troops freezing in the snows of Belgium, who had halted the German advance within four miles of the Meuse River. One of the more heroic episodes of the battle was the defense of Bastogne by surrounded American troops. (My future friend Robert Rivkin was in a armored unit that took part in the crucial battle, which stopped the Germans from achieving their goal of cutting off and destroying Allied forces in Holland and Belgium. We hit German marshalling yards again on December 30th, this time Kassel,  with unknown results. It was my twenty-first mission.

The year of 1944 was coming to a close and, despite the setback in Belgium, it looked as though the incoming year would be the last for Adolph Hitler. The men in the 351st Squadron like the men and women in the enemy’s military forces, and ours speculated on what the next year would bring. Would the war in Europe end soon? Would we survive our remaining combat missions? For my part, I didn’t like to speculate on the latter question. I did not believe in omens and had little faith in the predictions of fortune-tellers. When some of my friends, having flown about half their missions began reporting feelings that they were confident they would survive the rest of their 35 missions, I listened but said nothing. Personally I had no such feelings. Two of these friends were Dick King and a navigator on the Clifton Williams crew – his name was also Williams. He lived in a barracks next to ours.

After the mission to Kassel I wrote home that I was not tired and would not mind keeping up the pace to finish as soon as possible. Well, we flew the next day, the last day of 1944. This time the target was no easy marshalling yard in western Germany but the heavily defended synthetic oil refinery at Hamburg. It would be a tough target for my twenty-second mission. Thirty-six Fortresses selected for the mission assembled over the lowlands of East Anglia later in the day than usual. The weather was clear and cold. We were the seventh group in the Third Air Division heading for Hitler’s Reich. Our course was north of the Frisian Islands, the usual route to northern Germany. Abreast of Heligoland we turned southeast and entered the Koog Elbe estuary near Hamburg. The flak was heavy, as heavy as we had seen at Berlin, but not as intense as Merseberg. It was far more accurate as far as the 100th was concerned. There was a captured B-17 in German markings flying a mile to our left giving our track, speed, and altitude to the flak gunners. In addition to the black bursts at our altitude there were white bursts above us. (Nilsson called them a "devil’s canopy." Nearing the target we were holding our breaths when just ahead of us a 100th plane was hit by a burst of flak. They immediately salvoed their bombs and plunged downward into another 100th B-17 in the formation and both went down in flames. We counted several chutes but it was obvious that many crewmembers failed to escape the doomed Fortresses. I don’t know if I was aware at the time that the top plane was Floyd Henderson’s with my friend Dick King along as substitute co-pilot. The bottom plane was Clifton William’s whose navigator was my good buddy, Dick Williams, with the feelings. Another 100th plane flown by Billy Blackmon got hit and lost an engine. Luftwaffe fighters attacked as they lagged behind the formation. Enemy fire evidently hit one of their bombs and the ship exploded. Several crewmembers including Blackman parachuted into captivity. The flak was getting closer and closer to our plane and I felt several thumps as the plane shuddered. I felt an object strike my flak suit and looked down to see a piece of shrapnel, still hot, on a part of my lap covered by my flak vest. I looked up and saw a good-sized hole in our plexiglass nose between Buhse and me. (In 1991 I donated the flak shard and other war mementos to the 100th Bomb Group Museum at Thorpe Abbotts.)

After an eternity on the bomb run with several planes in our group getting hit and going down, we were over the target. Buhse fairly shouted "Bombs Away" on the intercom. Streich made an immediate turn to the Rally Point – it was now 1156 hours and we were attacked by approximately fifty enemy fighters, mostly Me-109’s and FW-190’s. There were two or more Me-262’s, the new jet fighters of the Luftwaffe. We later learned our fighter escort failed to appear because of a briefing "snafu." Was I frightened? I don’t recall fright as much as intense excitement as the adrenalin began to flow. Fighters were not as frightening as flak, for which we were a sitting duck. At least we could shoot at the enemy fighters. I tried to do just  that as a Fw-190 swooped in on our port side. I started firing and was struck sideways by Buhse’s rotating turret. I never had another chance to shoot at bandits as we called enemy fighters. Buhse’s turret was in constant action. I watched what seemed an unreal scene, a spectacular movie, enthralled as I saw several of our attackers go into spins trailing columns of smoke, victims of our gunners. Three of our crew claimed to have hit a combined total of five Nazi fighters during the air battle, and two of them, Whitacre and Holland, were given credit for two and one half "kills." A half "kill" could be credited when two gunners were firing at one plane. Our group as a whole was credited with twenty-three confirmed kills and eight probables. The entire Eighth Air Force was credited with fifty, so the 100th had almost one half of the Eighth Air Force total that day! Unfortunately, we lost one third of the total heavy bomber losses in the Eighth Air Force that bloody day. We lost twelve of the thirty-six we put up on this Hamburg mission.

As we reformed over the North Sea after the bomb drop and air battle with the Luftwaffe, which lasted much longer than I remember, planes began to fill up the gaps left in the formation ahead of us. Two planes, one piloted by Lt. Glen Rojohn of Greenock, Pa. And another flown by Lt. William MacNab of Wasco, Ore., headed for the same position from above and below respectively. They became entangled, with Rojohn’s plane sitting on top of MacNab’s and of course began to lose altitude rapidly over the sea just off the German coast. Rojohn and his co-pilot Lt. William Leek of Everson, Washington, in the upper plane’s cockpit,  managed to guide the locked planes towards the coast, but before they did two of MacNab’s and two of Rojohn’s crewmen bailed out and drowned in the icy waters of the North Sea. Several crewmen bailed out over the coast and survived, but neither of the pilots could bail out. The incredible dénouement of this incident is that Rojohn and Leek managed to land the locked aircraft and as they touched down the top plane bounced off the bottom one. It is probably the only case in history where two planes were landed piggyback by the pilot and co-pilot on only one of them. Rojohn and Leek were interned by the Germans and survived the war. The mystery is: what happened to MacNab and his co-pilot Lt. Nelson P. Vaughn, who were never taken prisoner?

The twenty-four surviving Fortresses of the 100th ‘s original thirty-six finally reached the English coast at 1400 hours. As we approached Thorpe Abbotts Striech tried to lower our landing gear, but discovered there was no hydraulic power to accomplish this. The engineer, George Holland, was able to get the landing gear down manually, but the plane would have no brakes for landing. Fortunately there was an emergency field with a long landing strip south of London and I gave Frank a heading for it. It was decided to attempt to effectuate some braking action by attaching a parachute to the tail gunner’s turret and opening it on our rollout. The maneuver succeeded and we landed safely. We were fed a hearty meal by our British hosts (It was a British airfield whose name I have forgotten) and transported back to Thorpe Abbotts by truck, arriving in the early evening. On our arrival we heard all the bad news and soon saw the empty cots of comrades who had failed to return – four out of the sixteen inhabitants of our barracks; my buddy Dick King, his pilot Floyd Henderson, Ken Kane, a jolly Irishman from Boston whose cot was next to mine – he was the navigator of the Wallace Wilson crew.  Lt. Sidney Brewin, another barracks mate of ours, had not flown that day and survived the war. He was inconsolable over the loss of his fellow crewmembers.

In addition to the crews of Henderson, Wilson, Williams, Blackman, Rojohn, and MacNab, six other "Bloody Hundredth" crews went down as a result of either ground fire or enemy fighter action. The other crews were those of Leo Ross, William Mayo, John Morin, Paul Carroll, Ralph Whitcomb, and Charles Webster. Fortunately sixty-three crewmen survived as POW’s. Forty-four others perished including the kid from Perry, Iowa, our ex-co-pilot, who had wanted to fly a fighter plane, to make love to Tondelayo, and more than anything else, live to see the end of the WWII. And we missed the target! (I have since learned that Kane and Wilson were among the surviving POW’s.)

Though the year’s end was costly to "Stye 9" and the 100th, it was even worse for the Axis enemy. The Red Army had Budapest surrounded and began to annihilate the German garrison there. A counteroffensive launched by Wehrmacht north of the Hungarian capital had failed to attain its objectives, just as the counteroffensive in Belgium was failing. In the Pacific the US was preparing to invade the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa from which to launch B-29 attacks on Tokyo, and the heart of the Japanese Empire. On the Home Front my parents were both active in drumming up support for the war effort through their organizations, such as sponsoring the sale of War Bonds. My mother also did volunteer work for the USO and my father was still an air raid warden for City Terrace. Fortunately they never had an air raid.

1945 – After the Hamburg mission, Frank Streich and I were given ten-day flak leaves beginning January 2nd. We started our leave by going to London and were angered to be turned away by the better hotels, which like the Savoy had closed their doors "for the duration" to American servicemen. (I laugh now when I recall that I had to caution Frank not to blame all the English – Anglophobia was rampant amongst our servicemen in Albion – for the policy of a few posh English hotels, and now Frank had forsaken his beloved New York to live among the benighted British in an apartment in West London.) We stayed at the Reindeer Club again.

The next day I contacted Connie and informed her of what had happened to Dick. She commiserated with me and said she would inform Dottie. We made a date to go to dinner and the theater on Wednesday night, just before Frank and I were scheduled to catch a night train to Scotland. We went to a theater in Soho Square and saw a comedy called "Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary?" which provided me with a welcome change of mood. I then rendezvoused with Frank and we caught the train to Edinburgh arriving on the morning of the 5th after a fourteen hour train ride. After catching up on our sleep we ventured out for sightseeing, cameras at the ready. The weather was cold and overcast, but at least it was not foggy and we were well protected from the cold by our wool-lined trench coats. We visited Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace, both rich in the lore of Mary Queen of Scots. Between them stretched the "Royal Mile" where we saw the Edinburgh residence of Robert Burns, whose earthy poetry had always delighted me. We strolled the length of Princes Street, the main avenue with its gardens and the famous monument of Walter Scott. At the end of this broad boulevard was the elegant Caledonia Hotel, where we ate like princes for the first time since leaving the U.S. and savored the belly-warming broth that Scotland is famous for. We were struck by what I called in my letter home the paradox of Edinburgh, so ancient and Gothic in architecture yet so open and spacious and modern-feeling in its central area and in its relative affluence compared to its more war-battered and deprived neighbor to the south. We were also impressed by the warmth and hospitality of the people, who, less affected and embittered by suffering of the war than the English, showed no trace of resentment toward their Yankee guests. Particularly touching was a dinner invitation by and old couple who accosted us on Princes Street. We regretted having to decline their most gracious invitation.

On our second day in the Scottish capital we climbed to the craggy top of Arthur’s Seat, 823 feet above Edinburgh, and had a magnificent view of the city, the hazy Firth of Forth with the Isle of May at the mouth of the estuary, snow capped hills across the Firth and to the west the shadowy highlands. To the north of us lay Calton Hill, an acropolis of sorts, with a minaret-like monument to Lord Nelson, obelisk dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, and some purposeless Roman columns, that were presumably intended to be a part of some grand but ill-fated architectural design. Beyond Calton Hill lay the dark and foreboding North Sea still awash with the corpses of downed American, British, and German aviators.

My description of the aspect of Edinburgh from our wind-blown eminence reads remarkably like what I might have written some forty-two years later of my visit to Prague, Czechoslovakia: symmetrically laid our with its castles, cathedrals, domes, spires, and rows of tail narrow buildings with thousands of little chimneys of all shape and sizes.

Evening life in this Presbyterian capital was not at all like that of Prague, nor London, for the good people of Edinburgh closed up shop and retired early, particularly in winter when the sun dipped below the shadowy highlands in what to a Californian would be mid-afternoon. We spent our two evening in the Caledonian metropolis warmly ensconced in our hotel room reading. I selected Upton Sinclair’s Dragon’s Teeth, whose length was ideally suited to Scotland’s long evenings.

We left Edinburgh early next morning and arrived in the bustling, but snowy north Scottish city of Aberdeen. According to my letter of January 8th our principal activity seems to have been eating – five filling meals in one day no less! That evening we found a movie theater and saw Fanny by Gaslight, a surprisingly good comedy. As a rule English film comedy was inferior to stage comedy, perhaps being intended for a "lower brow" audience. The following morning we headed back to Edinburgh where we caught an overnight train to London, as there was no direct train service to East Anglia. We arrived in London on a Wednesday morning with only enough time to see a movie, the wartime classic Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, which dramatized the first U.S. air attack on the Japanese capital by B-25’s commanded by General James Doolittle, starring, I believe, Spencer Tracy. (Readers are probably wondering why with all of the great museums London is famous for why we could find nothing better to do than attend a movie. This was the time when V-2 Rockets were targeting London daily and the museums had moved their exhibits to underground storage facilities. They remained closed until early 1945 when the rocket attacks ceased. When we arrive back at Thorpe Abbotts I found a record eighteen letter, twelve from my parents.

I was happy to learn that Harry Glassman was back in Los Angeles recuperating from his wound and was making good progress. I also learned that a cousin from Fall River. Mass, Harry Shapiro, who had an arm crippled in combat, was recuperating in a hospital near London. Though I had every intention of visiting him, I never had the opportunity to do so.

The next day I received five more letters from my parents that had accumulated during my ten day leave. In one of them they asked whether I was serious about Connie. The word "serious" is a loaded word and my answer was a bit flippant. The truth is that I did not know at the time how serious I was. I knew that I liked her company very much and looked forward impatiently to my monthly trips to see her in London. I knew she valued my company, for she was always available to go out with me when I was in London and corresponded with me at the base. I could not think past the present and knew that if I finished my job in England I would be returning to the U.S. without her. As for the exact nature of the "affair" I would characterize it as "sweetly" romantic, in an old-fashioned way. I was an idealistic gallant and incapable of offending the object of my admiration and respect; which is another way of saying our behavior was always very proper and the "romantic tension" of our relationship never broken.

Our crew resumed action on January 13th with a mission to bomb a bridge across the Rhine at Mainz, which we carried out successfully according to reconnaissance photographs. The following day our target was an oil storage depot at Derben, which is just west of Berlin. As at Hamburg the Luftwaffe challenged us again, but the story was very different on this occasion. Goering’s air force had by now lost the cream of its pilots and fighters over Derben were quite inept, resulting in six sure kills and two probably kills for our gunners. Not a single bomber was lost. Our crew did us proud again as Lehman, our ball turret gunner, claimed and was credited with one of the enemy fighters destroyed. (The Eighth Air Force shot down 183 Nazi fighters – a record for any one-day of the war) To make the mission even more satisfying, this time we had a perfect strike on the target. (As on the first Kaiserslautern mission, Frank had his camera and took pictures of our group in formation.)… Italics byPaul West

The briefing room was hushed on the morning of January 17th as we were being informed that the 100th was returning to Hamburg to bomb the oil refinery missed on December 31, 1944, the third bloodiest day in the 100th ‘s storied history. (Only the March 6, 1944 Berlin (15 B-17’s and 150 men) and October 10, 1943 Munster (12 B-17’s and 121 men) were more costly. Would this be a replay of the deadly events of December 31, 44 when one out of every three of our planes failed to return? I am sure there wasn’t a man on any of the thirty-six crews called to fly this mission who was not wondering about the odds for survival. What a happy surprise it was for us; the flak was mostly off the mark and no enemy fighters challenged us. This time we had no loses at Hamburg and we hit the target area. With three on-target drops in a row ‘the ‘gang that couldn’t shoot straight’ was getting lucky or just maybe a more steady hand.

We were scheduled for no combat missions for the next two days; on the 19th we were asked to take a new pilot and navigator up for check ride. The weather was very unstable that day with a minor hurricane blowing through in the morning. Not expecting to be up more than a couple of hours or to fly at a high altitude we were not wearing our heated flying gear. I had only a short fur-collared jacket with scarf and gloves. Most of the crew was dressed lightly. A half hour into the flight the weather suddenly closed in and we had to fly out of and over a snowstorm. Streich climbed from 6,000 to 18,000 feet and we were as cold as a ‘ naked Eskimo’s rear.’ I was so cold my thighs were freezing and I had to wrap my scarf around them. Soon my toes were freezing and I took my feet out of my shoes, stuffed my gloves over my toes, and shoved my cold toes as far into the shoes as I could get them. Naturally I could not use my hands longer than the short time it took to record our position. Most of the time I kept them in my pockets. I don’t know how Frank was able to keep his hands on the controls, which must have been freezing cold. Luckily there were two pilots and a co-pilot, so they must have taken turns as their fingers began to freeze. I don’t know how much longer we could have survived the cold at this altitude. The storm blew out after two and one half hours and we descended to Thorpe Abbotts for landing.

I wrote my parents that evening. I mentioned our adventure but spared them the lurid details. I never reported anything that represented a life-threatening hazard beyond the normal danger of combat flying. My Mother’s skin condition was still quite worrisome, a fact that my parents spared me. I could easily imagine the nervous strain my parents were subjected to without my adding to their anxiety. So after briefly mentioning the flight and snowstorm, I switched to the wonderful news coming from the eastern front. The Red Armies had swept past Warsaw, captured Lodz and Cracow and were approaching the German border.

After the Derben raid we had another change of co-pilots. The new co-pilot was Thomas J. Slaven of Rockledge, Pa.

We flew two missions in row on the 20th and 21st, one to the marshalling yards at Heilbronn just north of Stuttgart and the other to a railroad bridge across the Rhine at Mannheim near Ludwigshaven. Neither of the targets was heavily defended and we incurred no casualties, except a case of frostbite to our tail gunner’s ears on the Heilbronn mission. We flew in a plane whose electrical system was inoperative and although the temperature dropped to –60 Celsius as recorded on my temperature gauge we were unable to heat our flying suits.

The extreme cold of this northern European winter, the coldest in over a century, was especially treacherous at altitudes of twenty to thirty thousand feet. I cannot remember exactly which mission, but once I was almost done in by the cold in a matter that could only be described as an "absurdity". One problem of the long missions was the need to empty our bladders at least once. Most of the Fortresses had a "piss-tube" in the nose section, which was convenient for the navigator and bombardier. This consisted of a slender hose with a funnel shaped end, which was fit on to a aperture in the floor. As urine was run through the tube it turned to ice and drop like topaz colored hail to the ground. I liked to imagine every time I urinated over Germany, that my acidulous projectile would plink a Nazi burgher’s Aryan nose. On one mission we flew in a substitute Fortress- maybe it was the Heilbronn mission, had no relief tube in the nose section. I had to hook up a small walk-around oxygen bottle to take with me back to the cat-walk through the bomb bay. The engineer opened the bomb bay doors for me to pee out of and I had to remove my gloves to unzip my fly. So quickly did my fingers turn icy numb that I was unable to grip the zipper tab to perform this banal operation. The cold surge of air coming up through the open bay caused me to sway dangerously on the cat-walk and now it was even more futile attempting to unzip my fly. I don’t know how long I stood there looking down on some German forest 25,000 feet below, but it must have been long enough to cause the radio operator to wonder about my safety. I was beginning to pass out from lack of oxygen; the walk-around bottle must have been close to empty from the start. T/Sgt Pepper immediately recognized what was happening, grabbed another oxygen bottle and attached it to my mask, just in time to prevent me from being ejected as a human bomb on some undesignated German target. The providential radio operator helped me with the rest of the operation and I returned to my navigational duties in the nose.

The missions to Heilbronn and Mannheim were my twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh. The results of the Heilbronn mission were categorized as fair; we never heard the results for Mannheim. After these raids Streich and I were awarded our third Oak Leaf Clusters and, with Slaven, given forty-eight hour leaves.

We arrived in London on the evening of January 22 and took a room at what had by now become our home away from home, the Red Cross officers’ club. I was not able to see Connie until the next day at noon when I met her for lunch near her office. In the afternoon I saw a Russian film, The Rainbow, a powerful film that made the present Soviet offensive seem all the more dramatic as I explained in a letter home. That evening Connie and I went dancing at the Mayfair Hotel ballroom, one of London’s best. I had hoped to take more pictures with her as my earlier ones were not very clear – wartime film was often unreliable- but the foggy weather screwed us up again as I noted using the G.I vernacular. After an evening of dancing, I accompanied Connie to her parents’ apartment in Hornsey in north London. As we approached her street, she pointed out a block of apartment buildings that had been completely gutted by a V-2 rocket. The thought that it had come so close to her block made me shudder. At her home I met her mother for the first time. She was a pleasant woman, simple and hardworking, and like so many of her countrywomen, longing for the war to end and her husband to return to safety. I could not stay very long as it was nearly midnight and no busses back to the downtown area ran after that time.  As it was I barely made the last bus and reflected on the approaching end of my tour of duty and dates with my charming English girlfriend.

The fog that kept me from taking pictures in London, then a snowstorm, kept the 100th grounded for almost a week. Finally the weather cleared and on January 28th we attacked a bridge on the Rhine at Duisburg, which was only a few miles east of the Dutch coast. This was the shortest mission we had flown, a classic "milk-run" and best of all a successful bomb drop. It was also Fever Beaver’s 98th completed mission, tying a 100th record for most missions flown by a group B-17. (A 100th fortress I had flown, The All American Girl had recently been lost on its 99th mission to Cologne. One or two other "Bloody Hundredth" Fortresses had been lost in their 90’s and there was a superstitious notion rampant on the base that no 100th aircraft would ever break the 100th mission jinx by completing one hundred combat missions The next day were took the Beaver on her record setting 99th mission to attack an armored tank factory at Kassel (the Herschel and Sohn Works) in the Ruhr Valley. With each mission she completed she was now setting a group record.

January 29th was a memorable date for another more important historical event, the first penetration of German territory by the Red Army. The same issue of Stars and Stripes that reported our bombing of the tank works at Kassel featured the sensational news the "Russian troops under Marshal Zhukov had crossed the German border, penetrating the province of Pomeranian to a point only 95 miles from Berlin…

Although our crew had received a forty-eight hour pass less than two weeks earlier, we were due for another on February 2nd. As it turned out the enlisted members of our crew were restricted to the base for two weeks for failure to make their beds neat enough! In view of this the officers of the crew decided to forgo their passes as well, hoping to perhaps finish our tours a little sooner. We were awakened for a mission at 0330 hours on February 2nd, but after a five-hour delay the mission was scrubbed. The entire crew was informed we were to receive a Squadron Commendation Ribbon for missions flown in the period from July 31st to November 2, 1944. ( I flew seven missions during that period)

We finally got our chance to challenge the 100th’s jinx on February 3rd. We knew it was not to be a milk run when we were awakened at 0300 hours. Quite the contrary, the target was the center of Berlin and the purpose of the mission according to London newspapers was to deliver "a concentrated blow at the hard core of Nazi rule – the government buildings, Military Offices, the main rail center and marshalling yards”. The briefing for the mission was recorded in Contrails, and is as follows.

The Old Man (Col. Thomas S.Jeffrey, Jr., one of the youngest group commanders in the Eighth Air Force) faces the men in the briefing room. It is still and through the blacked out windows the nebulous sounds of base movement slip subconsciously into the minds of the men in the room. A door slams… Footsteps are heard in the hallway…A truck roars impatiently outside…The sounds are lost as a voice is heard…

It’s Berlin again this morning. The Russians are fighting close to the suburbs, and can use a little help against the German communications and transportation. As you know we have been inactive for the past five days. Had two missions scrubbed…Bremen and Berlin. Our last mission to Kassel was a good one…Out target today is the heart of Berlin, and our group will lead the entire 3rd Air Division. Major Rosenthal will lead [the 100th ] "A" group of the 13th Combat Wing. The wing will spearhead the division’s maximum effort…

Major Rosenthal was Rosie, a big Jewish ex-football player and law school graduate from Brooklyn, who had already flown 51 missions, a group record, and had been shot down twice. His first downing was over France in September 1944. His plane had come down and hit a tree. Rosie made it back to Allied territory albeit with a broken arm. In May 1944 his Fortress was hit over Germany and lost two engines on the same wing, making stable flight extremely difficult. He managed to guide the damaged B-17 back to the English coast and just made an airport. He had also flown the ill-fated Munster mission in October 10, 1943 on which his was the only one of the Bloody Hundredth planes that survived. Consequently a legend had grown around this 100th hero. The legend was that Rosie would not be killed in combat. The legend of Rosie can be read in John Nilsson’s The Story of the Century.

Rosie, the commander of the 418th Squadron was going to fly mission number 52, a new group record and lead the 3rd Air Division to Berlin. We were going to take Fever Beaver on her 100th mission, also a group milestone. This was also my 30th mission, yet another milestone of sorts. It was likely going to be my last shot at the "vipers nest" and I persuaded Buhse to let me drop the bombs this time. Who could tell? Maybe the bombs I would drop would blow away the mad Fuhrer himself.

Take-off was at 0715 hours. We assembled in the pre dawn sky over Norfolk and at 0920 hours left "Old Blighty’s" coast at Southwold. The assembly time was longer than usual since we were leading the 3rd Air Division and had to keep circling until the entire division was in formation. It took thirty-five minutes to reach the coast of Holland at Ijmuiden at 18,000 feet among gathering clouds. Our planes were leaving condensation trails like ski-tracks in the sky. The course was straight to Berlin (no North Sea detour this time), by way of Zwolle, Holland and the Dummer See and Hanover, Germany. At 1115 hours we reached the I.P (initial point of the bomb run) at 25,000 feet. As agreed I changed places with Buhse and watched the squadron leader to see the smoke bomb signal to hit the toggle switch and release our bombs. The clouds were breaking up and the ground was suddenly visible. As we entered the air space over Berlin’s suburbs the flak got thick and deadly. Although I was not aware of it at the time Rosie’s plane was hit in the number one fuel tank and caught fire, but the intrepid Brooklyn football player-lawyer held his course long enough to drop his bombs on the target. An instant later our squadron gave the smoke signal and toggled two tons of explosives out of the bomb bay on the heads of the Jew-killers below. Our bomb load was less than one thousandth the weight of explosives that the Eighth Air Force dropped on the bastards on this mission. Four of our planes were hit by flak just before or just after the target went down in flames but all managed to drop on the target before going out of control. Rosie, in one of the four planes, managed to keep flying long enough to reach the Russian lines near the Oder River east of Berlin. He and his crew managed to bail out and were greeted by the Russians. Thirty-six of our men went down on this mission to Berlin, but at least a dozen of them survived the war, either as guests of the Russians or prisoners of the Germans. The man who would not be killed had done it again and Fever Beaver had broken the group’s 100-mission aircraft jinx. When Streich landed at Thorpe Abbotts and taxied to our hardstand the entire ground crew were waiting and a great cheer went up as we exited the aircraft one by one. A photograph of our pilot and ground crew shaking hands marked the occasion. (I had the only copy until I gave it to Frank in 1991.)

The February 3rd raid on Berlin, though not as devastating as the "fire bombing" of Dresden by U.S. and British bombers eleven day later – the 100th did not take part in this raid – was one of the most demoralizing of the war to the leaders of the tottering Third Reich. According to the Stars and Stripes report of February 5th, "The Nazi Air Ministry received eight direct hits and other government building surrounding the Ministry, including the Reich Chancellery, Ministry of Propaganda, and Gestapo Headquarters were smothered under eighteen concentrations of high explosives. Five railroad stations were hit and the Tempelhof marshalling yards and nearby Tempelhof airdrome suffered damage. The Deutsche Gas works received a damaging blow.” (The raid was part of a large air operation known as "Clarion." Reports of the raid in English newspapers were more sensational, calling the raid, "not just an attack but a holocaust killing thousands of Berliners and refugees from the areas of Poland, Silesia, and Brandenburg," areas overrun by the Red Army.

It is indeed ironic that the British papers would use the term "holocaust" to describe an attack, admittedly costly in human life, on the very people who had redefined the word to mean the deliberate slaughter of millions.

Our plane, Fever Beaver, with her 100 combat missions, now could lay claim to a special place of honor in the annals of the 8th Air Force and in the history of the air war against the Third Reich. Her achievement was reported shortly thereafter in a Stars and Stripes column called "Spamland Shavings" by Sid Schapiro. As for us our names were inscribed on a bomb-shaped metal plate that was riveted to the side of Fever Beaver’s nose section, directly beneath the cockpit. There was a rumor circulated that we would be sent to tour the U.S. on a bond tour as the Memphis Bell had after twenty-five missions. Whether it was just an empty rumor or really based on some high official’s expressed intent, the project never materialized. I am sure that with the war nearing its conclusion, it was decided the propaganda value of such a tour could not justify the expense.

After a two-day rest we were awakened at 0315 hours on February 6th and briefed for another long mission to help the Russian drive into eastern Germany. The target was the center of Chemnitz, later renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt, a fairly large industrial center and rail junction just west of Dresden near the Czech border. We flew almost the entire mission over clouds, never able to see the city we bombed and, though no planes were lost,  we took plenty of flak causing some engine damage and we soon lagged behind the formation, eventually losing sight of them. I was now navigating on my own over Germany for about the eighth or ninth time. I was dubious of the course the lead navigator had been using. By my calculations we were heading too far south, but there was no way to verify the accuracy of the wind direction and velocity the lead navigator was using. Celestial navigation was impossible due to a solid overcast above us, dead reckoning required visual contact with the ground, another impossibility as we were flying over a solid undercast. Radio navigation would be suicidal, as it would give our position to the Luftwaffe monitoring stations – there was no functioning radar equipment on our Fortress. My only hope was to trust to my calculations, correct the heading we had been given and pray the clouds below us would open up before we hit the Atlantic coast and allow me to pinpoint our exact position. By the time I made my course correction we were, according to my calculations, over western Czechoslovakia, near Pilsen. I turned us hard west towards where I calculated Wurzburg to be. We flew for a couple of fingernail-biting hours over a total cloud cover. The crew was nervous about enemy fighters and I was worried about the huge correction I had made to our heading as well as enemy fighters. When the ground became visible I determined we were over northern France in the vicinity of Sedan. I scanned my maps of the area, looking for an identifiable river, rail junction, town or forest and could not immediately match anything from map to ground, I instructed Frank to descend to around 10,000 feet and circle to enable me find our exact position before we hit the coast. We began circled for five or ten minutes, an eternity for me, before I located a rail line crossing the Meuse River that confirmed our exact position. With a renewed sense of relief I gave Frank a heading that followed the northern border of France to Dunkerque. We were over Dunkerque at 1700 hours and the coast of England near Southwold at close to 1800 hours over a darkened English countryside. I am sure our ground crew must have thought Fever Beaver’s luck had finally ran out and that we were all lost. At last we spotted our base and ten hours after take-off Streich landed the Beaver on the runway, the last Fortress to come home form Chemnitz. Fever Beaver, a bit the worse for wear, had survived mission number 101. As for the results of the raid, well we never found out.

One would think that with the approach of my last combat mission and, even better, the demise of the hated enemy, my letters home would resonate with a more joyful tone than is evident in my letter of February 7th. My spirits were better on February 9th as we I flew my thirty-second mission: to bomb the armaments works at Weimar, a secondary target. Again the target visibility was zero making it impossible to know what we hit. I hoped we did not hit any of the Goethe monuments in that center of 18th- century German enlightenment. Nor was I aware that  Buchenwald, that center of 20th-century German unenlightenment was nearby!

We didn’t fly another mission for the next five days and I grew more and more impatient with the delays to our completion of combat operations. My mood was buoyed some on the 11th with the presentation of my fourth Oak Leaf Cluster to my Air Medal and on the 12th by the receipt from Cousin Sumner in Belgium of a letter with pictures of him and his recent bride, Rose. On the 13th or thereabouts I hit two jackpots, one playing blackjack – I won the equivalent of seventy-two bucks, which would be worth at least fifteen times that, or over a thousand bucks today – and one at mail call; seven letters, making a total of thirty-eight for the first half of February.

We finally flew another mission on February 15th, our longest, to the rail center of Cottbus, just eight miles from the Polish border between Dresden and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, with the purpose of wreaking more havoc on the Germans in the face of the Red Army. There was no photoreconnaissance of the target after the raid but I and many other crewmembers reported seeing a huge red glow come up from the target area after our bombs were dropped. We were all convinced we hit something big; like a munitions dump or munitions transport.

The Cottbus mission was Fever Beaver’s 103rd, which we believed tied the 8th Air Force record for heavy bombers; a belief we were never able to confirm. It was also the thirty-fourth for the crew, which meant their next  would be their last. I was told by the Operations Officer that I could finish with my crew, even though they had flown one more mission than I had.

After a one day stand down during which I won more money at cards, we flew our "final" mission on the 17th, a relatively short one to the area north of Frankfurt-am-Main. Our intended target was the rail yards at Bad Nauheim, but two other navigators and I insisted we actually attacked the rail yard at nearby Giessen. Photoreconnaissance later confirmed our identification of the drop site and showed that most of the bombs missed the yard.

This was our last mission in Fever Beaver and I thought with the 100th Bomb Group. (Fever Beaver would successfully return from twenty-one more combat missions by the end of hostilities in Europe. Her 125 missions were a 100th record and one of the highest mission totals in the 8th Air Force. The crew, all of whom except Slaven and Lehman had now completed their tours and planned a party with who knows how much Scotch and a nine gallon keg of beer. Frank hit the bottle the minute he climbed out of the Beaver’s cockpit and was out "cold as a mackerel" by the time the party was supposed to start. Personally, I got to the party a half hour late; I wanted to send a telegram home announcing the good news. By the time I arrived at the party two of the crew were already prostrate and most of the drinks had been consumed. Dunst (25 missions) and Slaven (10 missions) were at the party but they drank moderately, fearing they would have to fly tomorrow. I drank moderately because most of the liquor had already been drunk before I got to the party!

On the morning of the 18th I sent a letter home confirming the telegraphed message. I also wrote that a snag in my promotion to First Lieutenant might delay my departure from the base.

On the following morning I was surprised to be awakened at 0400 hours by a mission call. I was being required to fly number thirty-five after all. I flew with the crew of Fools Rush In – cannot remember who the pilot was. The target was the marshalling yards at Osnabruck, which we had bombed three months earlier. This time we did some verifiable damage. I was finishing with a ‘base hit!’ Dunst and Lehman did not have a chance to fly their last missions while I was on the base, but I later learned that both completed their tours.

As soon as I was back at the barracks I wrote home again to re-confirm the completion of my tour. By a remarkable coincidence of timing, however, my telegram, though premature when I dispatched it, was accurate by the time it arrived on February 19th at 0944 hour Los Angeles time, which was 1744 Greenwich Mean Time, just after I returned from Osnabruck! When my parents got the news they bought a bottle of champagne and for first and only time in her life my Mother got a little tipsy.

On the day after I finished my missions, Tom Slaven and I went to London on a two-day pass. Connie and I went to see the Frank Capra comedy classic Arsenic and Old Lace at the movies. The next day Connie accompanied Tom and me to a restaurant for dinner, after which I took her to see a stage comedy, See How They Run. Tom and I returned to the base on the 23rd after having lunch with Connie and taking some more pictures. On my return to the base I picked up my "Luckye Bastardes Club" certificate, which was issued to all bomber crewmen who completed combat tours in the ETO. Then I smoked the cigar I had brought from the U.S. to be lit only when my combat tour was over.

Postscript: This concludes the account of my 35 combat missions with the 100th Bomb Group, which I left on March 1st without my promotion, ultimately denied me because of an intemperate exchange of views with a superior officer regarding a non-combat assignment. On my return to the States I was reassigned to the Transport Command and in August and September flew several troop-carrying missions between Atkinson Field, British Guiana and Miami, Florida, by way of Borinquen Field (now Ramey AFB) in Puerto Rico. Those were the last two legs of the Green Project, whose purpose was to return GI’s from the CBI at the end of the war in Pacific. I left the service on October 8th, 1945 and returned to civilian life.

My English girl friend and I continued to write each other for many years. In the summer of 1948, during the Olympics in London, she married an RAF pilot. I attended both the Olympics and their wedding. Two months later, I met Jeanne Gurtat in Paris and we were married in March of 1949. We have two children and five grandchildren. In 1991 Frank Streich and I visited the 100th Bomb Group Museum at Thorpe Abbotts and contributed several items. I still communicate with Frank, who has moved back to the States after living in London for a time. I also still communicate with Frank Dunst, who is now retired and living in Fillmore, California. For many years Herm Buhse and I exchanged Christmas cards, but we have since lost track of each other. I have no knowledge of what happened to the others on our crew. J. B. Pearson, our crew chief, was a personal friend and benefactor of young Sam Hurry back at the base. Sam told me that Parson died in the mid 1980’s. I also received a phone call from Tex Mattiza (tail-gunner) in 2003. He is alive and well in Magnolia, Texas.

Thoughts:
Formatting and making this document web-ready brings to the surface my feeling for this magnificent group of men. They were given to us at a time in our history when nothing short of the finest would suffice to perform the task asked of them. That I am typing this is proof of their success. All future generations must strive to insure they are never forgotten. I have been blessed to call them friends; they are truly "Our Greatest Generations," an exclusive club to which Leon and Jeanne Schwartz are charter members.

Paul West