12 days have passed since the last mission! Many changes have taken place! Tony's crew returns from the Flak House (a rest and recreation facility) to Sudbury to find many familiar faces missing!
On 10 April, the 486th Bomb Group goes through the grueling mission to Briest:
On 17 April, on a mission to Dresden, two more ships are shot down!
One of those ships is "The Pursuit of Happiness" in which Tony's crew had flown just a few weeks before. The entire LT Bartl crew is lost.
Also on the 17th, LT Allbright's crew gets shot down but all manage to bail out to safety. All are captured by the Germans.
April 12th shocks the entire country! The President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dies suddenly. The Germans are losing the war, but Adolf Hitler is still alive in Berlin (as a matter of fact, he celebrates his 56th birthday in his bunker on the 20th), the war in the Pacific continues. The Roosevelt administration had never seriously prepared for a presidential succession.
A new President is sworn in, Harry S. Truman, and most of the country is unaware of who he is! And he is woefully unprepared to take on the responsibility. It is two weeks into his presidency before he is briefed about the fact that the United States has been developing an atomic bomb.
Tony's Mission Log: On 17 April, on a mission to Dresden, two more ships are shot down!
One of those ships is "The Pursuit of Happiness" in which Tony's crew had flown just a few weeks before. The entire LT Bartl crew is lost.
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| Bartl's Crew |
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| Salvagers in Czechoslovakia recovering a wing from "The Pursuit of Happiness" |
Also on the 17th, LT Allbright's crew gets shot down but all manage to bail out to safety. All are captured by the Germans.
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| Allbright's Crew |
April 12th shocks the entire country! The President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dies suddenly. The Germans are losing the war, but Adolf Hitler is still alive in Berlin (as a matter of fact, he celebrates his 56th birthday in his bunker on the 20th), the war in the Pacific continues. The Roosevelt administration had never seriously prepared for a presidential succession.
A new President is sworn in, Harry S. Truman, and most of the country is unaware of who he is! And he is woefully unprepared to take on the responsibility. It is two weeks into his presidency before he is briefed about the fact that the United States has been developing an atomic bomb.
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| Joseph Stalin, Truman, and Winston Churchill |
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| Tony's last entry on his Mission Log. His next mission would be the last combat mission the 486th Bomb Group ever conducted. |
"Today I made my 27th mission- to marshaling yards at Wustermark near Berlin. Planes were bombing railroads and communication all around the west side of Berlin today the object being to cut everything to and from Berlin. It shouldn’t be long before they take Berlin. We carried 10-500 lb. bombs which we dropped from 22,000 ft.- visual. On the way back we dropped down to about 10,000 ft, and got a very good view of Germany from Berlin across Hanover, which has thousands of craters around it and few intact buildings in it and along the western edge of the Ruhr Valley where German resistance ended yesterday. Just west of the Ruhr near a bend in the Rhine a lot of American gliders were scattered around. Evidently a large landing had been made here [Operation Varsity]. The ground was full of shell holes which are much smaller as a rule than bomb craters and long zig-zag trenches and traps."
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| Intelligence Report map prepared for General Kibler on 20 April 1945, he served under General Omar Bradley. |
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