Dancing Fish Productions

11 May 44 - Mission 1: CREW 713 Mission #1.

As of 11 May 44, Operation Overlord (D-Day) was still scheduled for 19 May 44. The Allies had many pre-invasion missions scheduled in the days leading up to the D-Day landings as well as other missions designed to keep Hi**er convinced that the landings would be at Calais or possibly in the southern part of France. Today's mission for the 492nd and the rest of the 8th Air Force were for this. The 492nd bombed the marshalling yards at Mulhouse, France, which is near the Belfort gap, the main supply route for German logistics pouring into France. While the 492nd along with the rest of the 8th Air Force was in the air, the Supreme Command decided to push the D-Day date to June 5th. These types targets were also rescheduled for the new D-Day date.

From the diary of CREW 713 bombardier Charles Crowley: Mulhouse, France (railroad marshalling yards), 10 miles from Swiss border, 30 miles from Germany, Nine hour flight, five hours on oxygen over enemy territory. Hit flak at coast and one hour inland. No flak over target. Slight fighter opposition. 3 ME-1O9's shot down, one B-24. Five chutes seen. Two flak holes in ship. Hole in bomb-bay; radioman had to crank doors open. Got up 0340; Take off 1000; Target 1600; Landed 1900; 6 1000-lb bombs; Altitude: 19,000 ft; One plane crashed in England. One man killed — one man broken back. 44 Bombers lost for day.

At home, American pilots flew without any regard to gas consumption. Although they had some classroom instruction on how to conserve fuel, they didn't practice this. Should anyone find themselves running low on gas, then there were plenty of places to land and get more. However, combat missions are different. Planes can only carry so much weight. So mission planners had to decide how much gas and bombs their planes would carry. Short missions could carry more bombs because less gas was put into their tanks while long missions had to carry fewer bombs because they needed full tanks. This meant the Army Air Force would only give their planes what was considered just enough gas to get the job done.

Unfortunately, rookie combat pilots throughout WWII had to learn this lesson the hard way because nobody was warning them. For reasons unknown, even after the commanders saw their rookies come back low or completely out while their seasoned veterans got back with half full tanks, nobody was telling anybody why. On this day the 492nd lost two planes because they ran out of gas crash-landing in English fields, killing one man and severely wounding three others. One of the pilots was a green rookie, but the other was an experienced pilot instructor. What the two pilots had in common was they were both on their first combat mission flying the way they were taught.

More info on Mission 1...
http://www.492ndbombgroup.com/cgi-bin/pagepilot.cgi?page=showMission&mission=01

Donate to the film production fund for Crew713...
http://www.crew713.com/cgi-bin/pager.cgi?strPage=donate

Saturday doodle-a-day #6. short of time today, so needed a short word. Español to the rescue.

Friday doodle-a-day #6 auf Deutsch

Thursday doodle-a-day #5 today in Arabic.

Wednesday doodle-a-day #4 switching it a bit, Japanese today

Tuesday doodle-a-day #3 no apologies for the continuation of the obvious theme.

Monday doodle-a-day #2 it just made sense to continue on a theme... wonder what I'll do tomorrow?

Sunday My first doodle-a-day. A personal challenge to create something every day and re-invigorate my traditional drawing chops.

Finally, after far too long, we finally have uploaded our new website at www.dancing.fish.

Really determined to keep it much more up to date than in the past.

Give it a look and let us know what you think.

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