7/30/45: You have your mouse; we have our rats.  They are hungry critters here.  Believe it or not, they are awful pests in the airplanes, & a complaint was made this morning that in one plane they had eaten a first-aid kit and a fiber helmet liner.  When they start in on wiring insulation, it really will be serious.  The crew chiefs have to get rat-traps.  Your description of the mousie incident was so realistic I could almost smell it myself!

 

Well, Public Relations has put out some releases which you may have read in the paper – regarding our Wing.  I can tell you a lot now: in fact our S-2 officer, Maj. Atkins, says we can tell most anything right now.  Here’s a little of it.  We had our first raid June 26, & ever since we have had them every 3rd night.  In July we had 10 missions, hitting mostly oil refineries.  They are at present our specialty.  Utsube, Kamamatsu, Ube, Nippon Oil Refinery near Osaka, & a number of other places have been targets.  Our planes have been up in the Tokyo area twice.  So far we have not been on fire raids, & believe it or not – we have not lost a single plane, & our planes have only been hit on one mission, with two men receiving non-hospitalizing injuries.  That’s a record for heavy bombing.  Night fighters (Jap) fly right alongside our planes for miles over Japan, yet they didn’t fire.  No one can figure it out.  Usually there is absolutely no opposition.  We had heavy flak on a mission two missions ago, but that’s only one.  Often they’re over these supposedly heavily defended areas & not even see a search-light.  Of course, with this, the morale is high.  When I spoke of losses, I mean our Group, not the whole Wing.  There have been some very light losses in the Wing.

 

It was especially rugged at first, as every crew was having to go on 4 training missions – bombing Truk [island still occupied by Japanese navy at that time]. & a few other places.   So, I had to be up for missions taking off at midnight, 7 AM, & all hours.  Then before all the crews had their shake down missions over, we started on Empire Strikes.  That was rugged.  But now it’s a routine – Empire Strikes every 2nd or 4th day, & they take-off late afternoon, landings after an early breakfast, & it works out fine.  Lots of these letters I write from the line are started during a takeoff.  I wish you could see one.

 

Oh yes, we are at Northwest Field, but they made a mistake in “Life” [article], & the field they called that is really North Field, where another Wing is stationed.  It’s a couple of miles or so from us.  Our field [below] is laid out quite differently from the north Field.  We have two long airstrips, but our planes park on long ramps, like back in the states, not in individual revetments as shown in the [Life] picture. [This photo of the NW Field was taken after the lab tent was replaced by a Quonset hut.  This is not a night photo.  The brightness of the coral runways requires a lower exposure to prevent the entire picture from being washed out. See pages 217 and 231.]

 

Lt. DeKorne’s Group is over on the other runway from us, & I wish he was with us.  If you see pictures of planes with Y on the tails, they are ours.  I doubt if you’ll see any pictures, though for a reason you may remember my mentioning.

 

Our lab facilities are poor – not enough water, so would you wash the prints for 10 or 20 minutes & redry them.  They’ll last longer.  Now to read some Sherwood Anderson short stories.