“I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Battle of the Bulge, but the Germans had broken through and had a bunch of our troops trapped. The weather was really bad for flying so we couldn’t get to them to help. Finally, we were getting a break in the weather. We had our briefing and everything like that and went out to get on board.

You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face because the fog was so thick. We started the engines at regular time, they didn’t cancel anything, so we began to taxi very carefully. Ted and I had a practice. Normally on take off we were supposed to put down 30 degrees of flaps to give you more lift. But we operated on the theory that we didn’t put our flaps down until we reached 80 mph. We figured the resistance of the flaps would slow us getting to that speed, so we always used that system.

Anyhow, we were roaring down the runway, one of us was on the compass to see the heading we were trying to hold, and the other was trying to see if he could see anything. And he couldn’t. We couldn't see a damn thing. We got off the ground all right and at 500 feet we popped out into the sunshine. It’s just unbelievable to come out of the soup like that.

Then, our tail gunner called in and said he saw black smoke coming up through the fog. It turned out that the plane one or two before us crashed. He wasn’t able to get off the ground. We knew there was a possibility of icing. Over there they used to de-ice like airliners do now, but they used mops and buckets with de-icing fluid. Evidently, they were picking up ice and were too heavy with the bomb and fuel load.

A couple other planes scraped into trees because they were having trouble getting altitude. So they stopped take off and canceled the mission. Only nine of us had gotten off the ground. Our station was close to the water, that’s why we had that fog. The other groups were able to form normally so we flew with them. It was important that we got there. That’s why we went ahead and helped bomb that day.

For a period of time on a bombing mission it was hazardous and dangerous, but we had it pretty good compared to the guys on the ground. We came back and had bunks, they weren’t much to speak of, but we had bunks. We also had a little pot belly stove that if you got close enough to it you might feel some heat, but at least we had some heat. It was better than being on the ground.”