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Lead Team As far back as late June it had already been mentioned that we were being considered for lead-team evaluation and training. John had been with the 614th Squadron at its inception in Glasgow, Montana, before coming to Rapid City where he joined our crew. By this coincidence , our placement in the 401st Bomb Group reunited him with several old acquaintances who had risen in the hierarchy, and this may have drawn attention to us as a crew. When this finally came before us, more or less as a proposal rather than a direct order, it created something of a strained situation . Lockhart was totally in favor, and so was 1. Jardine had his reservations, and Ham did not seem to cast a vote. Of course Lockhart saw it as a multifaceted opportunity; almost immediate promotion and prestige and release from the long drudgery of formation flying, and I thought of it as a chance to increase my satisfaction with the job of being a navigator. Jardine reminded me, however, that it was the pilots' Air Force, and that my busywork would earn me no favors. The friction continued and gradually generated heat. By the first ofAugust, the decision was made to start flying us as squadron deputy-lead, and John made it clear that he wanted no part of the deal. I was sorry that it came to that, because I'd gotten 1 02 LeadTeam comfortably used to his companionship in our penthouse in the B-17, and I was more than willing to keep it that way. The officers of our crew were thus rearranged. Russell Lockhart and I were joined by a bombardier named George Lewis, who must have been three or four years older than I was, and quite by chance he had the same number of mission credits as we did. He was mature, businesslike, and friendly, but only to a point. During our practice bombing at the Wash, I immediately found that he was a calm and very deliberate master ofhis trade. We were also provided with a radar operator named Bill Strong, who was a flight officer with a blue bar insignia making him the equivalent ofa warrant officer in the Army. As the radar, or "mickey," operator he had his office back in the radio room, and thus we met primarily at briefing. While Lewis and I worked well in the air together and learned to have complete trust in each other, we never formed a close friendship , and I didn't even know where he lived in the squadron area. Although John began to fly with another crew, we still thought of him as one of us, and he continued to live in our Nissen. When in August we began to fly squadron lead after a practice period as deputy, Porter was replaced in the right seat by a series of guest riders, persons of rank to give us command authority. They were various. On several letters of commendation that we received for textbook strikes under difficult circumstances, these illustrious personages were mentioned first, although they exercised their duties in the copilot seat while Russell and the autopilot did the flying. They did no navigating, no target identification, no bombsight synchronizing , but they gave us that difficult-to-define essence known as leadership. On three or four occasions it was our squadron commander , Major Eric de Jonckheere. He was a pleasant guy, and I liked him. So, while his contribution was somewhat intangible, he never caused a problem for us. Porter was ultimately given a crew and finished his tour as a first pilot, or aircraft commander. But, as I've mentioned, we still lived together and thought ofourselves as "the crew." 1 03 Return from Berlin Our crew reconstituted as a lead team, August 1944. Back row, from left: George Lewis, William Strong, Russell Lockhart, Porter Ham, and Otto Schlaegel. Front: Elno Pyles, Larry Million, Lloyd Null, and Robert Grilley. A lead team, as it was constituted in the 40Ist Bomb Group, was the pilot, navigator, bombardier, and mickey operator. They practiced a good deal between missions, using a pickup copilot and dropping small marker bombs with ten-pound explosive charges on targets in a large shallow bay called the Wash, located just north of the bulge of East Anglia. The strikes were photographed, and the bombardier was graded for circular error, or CEo This was done at very high altitude to simulate real bomb runs. Lewis...

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