On the trip back we also stayed over the water to stay out of range of the flak batteries. The crew wanted me to bail out and get medical help on the ground, but I told them that as long as the plane kept flying I would stay with it. It didn't make any sense for me to bail out and start a war all by myself with one arm and a 45 cal. pistol.

They took good care of me, although they did cut the sleeve off of my perfectly good shirt in order to attend to my arm. And as I told you we crashed upon returning to the base
Intérieur B24
B-24 LIBERATOR tail inside

On the bombing run to the target we always stayed in formation and dropped our bombs on cue when the lead ship dropped theirs.

When we saw the bombs fall from the leader we triggered ours at the same time. It was called “PATERN BOMBING”, and as you can imagine we covered the area pretty well with the formation spread over a half mile.

We flew in groups of three with four groups in each echelon. That made a lead group of twelve. The rest were also in the same configuration spread further out on each side and to the rear of the lead group. Thus we covered the target area with a lot of sure hits.
Formation

I hope this will give you a picture of our formations as we flew them. It was touchy to fly these formations because most of the planes were subject to the propwash from the planes ahead of them which made it difficult to control these big ships.
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