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

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"That day we were escorted by M.P.'s to the mission briefing. There was no way they were going to let details of the up coming D-Day invasion to leak out."

"Colonel Vance started the meeting...'All right men, this is it. We are going out at all costs! We have painted stripes on all of our aircraft for identification. If you see a plane without them, shoot it down!'"

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"The mission was to to bomb the beach in advance of the landing craft. Perhaps we might knock out some pill boxes or machine gun installations, but mostly the craters we created would serve as foxholes for the troops."

"On the way I saw so many boats on the English Channel that it seemed that you could walk to Normandy!" "That day the clouds were very low. Normally that would cause a mission to be scrubbed. We were directed to go in at all costs and so flew under the clouds and were much closer to the ground than expected." "Over our intercom someone on the crew yelled, 'Hey they're shooting at us from the ground (not flak...machine guns!)!'

"Captain Shepherd answered, 'What are you waiting for? Shoot back!.' "We shot back at the source of the tracer bullets coming from their machine guns."