After posting the mission log book I interviewed my dad. I had a lot of questions about the occurences and the people involved. Dad didn't enter certain kinds of information in his mission log when he wrote it. He just kept to the facts. On the log I have created hyperlinks to the information below.

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"Lt. Carlson flew with another crew one day when the rest of us had "the day off". It seems he wanted to catch up with the rest of the crew in regard to the number of missions. We wanted to all be "retired" with 65 missions at the same time."

"Carlson was a bombardier and served as such with the crew of his "extra" mission. According to the story they told me, he had been having trouble with his helmet. It was loose and kept falling in front of his eyes when he tried to look down into the bomb site. Finally, he took the damned thing off. Soon after a piece of flak hit him in the head and killed him." "It seems like I heard of similar things happening to guys who took an extra mission. It was a jinx I guess."