In our previous issues of THE FLYING CIRCUS Newsletter we have been keeping you up to date on the above part of our History Project for the 380th, and tentatively promising its completion by Reunion time. Unfortunately, the conversion of the manuscript to electronic form has turned out to be a tremendous task, particularly when it must be done in Barb's spare time from her regular tasks, and so completion will not now be possible by October. Particularly time consuming has been the scanning and sorting of the numerous pictures available on the planes and their nose art. We hope to be able to give you a chronological listing of the nose art changes of many of our planes.

We will bring the completed project manuscripts with us to Dayton as they exist at the time of the Reunion. Those of you who were present there will remember that we did this for the Personnel volumes at the San Diego Reunion in 1998. You will be able to go through all of the material at Dayton on the present project and let us have your comments as at San Diego.

We had hoped to be able to derive the complete maintenance crews for each aircraft, but unfortunately the records are silent on most of the individual assignments to particular aircraft. We will do what we can, but have decided to prepare a re-listing of all ground personnel by MOS and Job title. This is basically a reformatting of Volume I, the Personnel Roster. We will call this Part VII and move the Part Numbers of the Mission Volumes forward.

Our contacts with the other groups have shown that, along with the Horton and Fain, et al., histories, the 380th is far ahead of any other WWII Air Force group in developing and recording our history. In fact, our work has inspired many of the other groups to develop similar projects to our own!