| 380th Bomb Group Association |
NEWSLETTER #2 -- March 2000 |
WE WENT TO WAR, PART V
The Aircraft We Flew
A Report on the Status of Our Continuing Project on the
History of the 380th Bomb Group (H) in WWII
As I have mentioned to many of you in our conversations and letters, our goals for developing more detail of the History of the 380th in WWII beyond that which the Horton Brothers could put in their magnificent books does not end with the Rosters which we produced last year. As you know, that which is already published includes four parts:
PART I The Group Personnel Roster by Individuals
PART II The Flight Crews by Individual Crews
PART III An Extract of PARTS I and II presenting only the Australian and other Commonwealth personnel, for use in Australia
PART IV A Listing of the Military Occupational Specialties (MOSs) Necessary in an Isolated Group like the 380th. This material also is an extract from PARTS I-III.
We promised to continue our work with (at present planning) three further PARTS as follows:
PART V The Aircraft We Flew
PART VI The Missions of the 380th Bomb Group (H) Out of Australia and New Guinea
PART VII The Missions of the 380th Bomb Group (H) Out of The Philippines and Okinawa
Despite the size of the Roster volumes, these three could well be much larger because of the massive amount of detail required for an adequate explanation in each case. For example, we have already found 215 separate aircraft. The listings made by the Hortons in their books are obviously a major input to this for which we are eternally grateful. However, we wish to include the early history of each plane, each mission in which it participated and the crew involved, the ground crew to the extent possible, noseart used, etc.
The 380th flew at least 1,200 separate missions because of the very high proportion of small reconnaissance, photo mapping, and search missions involved. This compares to the 400 range for most European groups, but, of course theirs were of a much different nature from ours.
For each mission (or group of similar missions), we would hope to develop a map of the mission track to the target and back; track over the target; a summary of the results achieved; and a summary of mission performance in terms of mechanical aborts, weather problems, etc. Of course, a discussion of any mission losses, damage, etc., would be important.
Manuscripts the size of those of the rosters would be possible if we can average about three pages each for each separate aircraft for PART V, and about one page each on average for the missions. This latter would be possible because of the very repetitive nature of our recce missions and the lonely, no sightings nature of most of them. Thus detailed explanations would only have to be made for one of a group of repetitive missions such as the various shipping searches.
It is doubtful if we would be able to publish these manuscripts in hardbound form as we did for the Rosters. However, our Web Site would prove an excellent solution to this problem and allow us to tell the 380th's story to the world.
We have been fortunate to be able to obtain the help of Mr. Allen G. Blue, considered by many to be the world's authority on the B-24, to supply the early history data on all of our airplanes manufactured by Consolidate (the vast majority). He has also given us leads to do the same for the Ford aircraft (the Ls and part of the Ms).
As you may know, I have the mission planning documentation for all of our missions, which includes the crew manifests and aircraft assignments for each of them. We are approximately one-third finished in abstracting this information for PART V. It will be necessary to go back into the microfilm tapes used for the Roster Project to develop ground crew assignments, aircraft on-hand data, engineering reports, and intelligence summaries of mission results.
We therefore expect to have worthwhile material for all of you to review at the San Antonio Reunion as we had at Panama City and at San Diego for the Roster Project.