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May-5 June 1944 8. Air Offensive Europe The 406th Fighter Group entered the fray with a fury that was spurred by Colonel Grossetta's words as he opened his fighter's throttle on takeoff to lead the first full group mission: "All right guys, here we go! Remember, no guts, no glory!" An hour later we sustained our first combat casualty—Major Bill "The Green Hornet" Merriam, who was senior group operations officer. We had flown into northern France, our mission to dive-bomb and strafe a German airfield. The airfield was defended by all sorts of flak guns—heavy, medium, and light—and after the first section of four Jugs went screaming down from 12,000 feet on their dive bombing runs, the Krauts turned it all on. Merriam, leading the second section, yelled over the R/T: "Here goes the Green Hornet!" and down he dove flat out through the hail of flak. I witnessed the whole thing as it happened. I was circling above the enemy airfield taking strike photos of the action with a new camera that had been installed in my Jug's fuselage belly. Just as Merriam dropped his 500-pound RDX bombs he got hit in the engine by several 40-mm cannon shells. His P-47 began to smoke, streaming oil, and then it began to burn. He pulled out of the dive, picking an open field to try to belly in his kite. He was too low to bail out. Merriam's voice came again to us over the radio, "That's all for me, boys. Guess I'll get captured . So long." I watched Merriam's Jug touch the ground, slide across the small field in a cloud of dust and smoke, and then in a sheet of flame it blew all to hell. The Green Hornet never got out. We continued our attack on the Hun airfield until it was practically reduced to a mass of rubble. Columns of smoke from burning buildings, fuel storage tanks, destroyed aircraft, and exploding ammunition dumps attested to the plastering we gave the place. We must have destroyed at least thirty or forty enemy aircraft dispersed around the 120 FighterPilot airfield perimeter and in sand bagged revetments. It was indeed a shambles when we finished our attack and returned to our home base at Ashford. Major Littleton C. Selden assumed Bill Merriam's group operationsjob. The group was now flying at least two combat missions daily, sometimes three, which is pretty tough on pilots. Each mission duration averaged about three hours, striking targets in France, Belgium, and Holland. I don't think many fighter pilots enjoyed dive-bombing. It seemed that special targets were always selected for Thunderbolt pilots: well defended targets like railway marshalling yards, airfields, communications centers, factories, and critical bridges. The concept of our employment was simple. The inline-engine fighters couldn't take the heavy flak, the big 88-mm cannons, 40-mm rapid-firing "Chicago pianos," 20-rnm and 7.9-mm light flak. One round through the coolant system and a fighter like that was a dead duck. But the good old lumbering cast iron Jug could take it all and survive. You'd be absolutely amazed at the P-47s that made it home after being literally shot to pieces—cylinders blown completely off engines and streaming oil, great rents and holes blasted through wings, fuselage, and tail planes. A great percentage of those tough old war birds were Class 26ed (junked) after bringing their pilots safely home. Armed recce suited the Jug pilot better; targets of opportunity, as they were called. Shooting up railway trains in enemy territory was by far the most exciting. Dive down at about a thirty-degree angle to the train's route of travel to give the Hun antiaircraft gunners a deflection shot, which they usually missed. Now squirt the locomotive with your eight .50-caliber guns firing API (armor piercing incendiary) ammo. A few good hits on the boiler and up would pop a geyser of white steam and smoke. Now you had the train stopped and could beat it up at your leisure. If it proved to be an ammunition train, some caution had to be exercised in case it blew up under you on a firing pass. One of our 406th boys had to fly through the debris of such an explosion, and an 88-mm shell case smashed into the leading edge of his starboard...

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