15th mission: Royan

Exchanged e-mails with B-17 navigator Marshall Stelzriede a few years ago, and he told me:

It is really amazing that your dad could have flown 15 missions in 30 days. That was a mission every other day. It took me five months to do 25, and that was really exhausting...

Daddy's last combat mission, just a few weeks before his 19th birthday:

It was yesterday's target but today's weaponry was new--for the first time the Air Force used napalm. The armorers obviously had trouble with these "new fangled" bombs for pilot Peder Larsen recorded: "New petroleum bombs were put into the planes and were leaking! Flew ship #777 out to the Channel and was instructed to drop them from 300 feet"... -- Snetterton Falcons

[T]he bomb load consisted of some P-51 wing tanks filled with napalm with an igniting device. Emitting fumes that even penetrated the crew's oxygen masks, the bomb bay doors were opened slightly to allow the fluid napalm to go out into the slip stream. One can conjecture that the personnel responsible for filling these tank did not take into consideration that by filling the tanks to the brim at ground level, the fluid would expand at altitude and over flow... -- GG Greenwood, 351st Bomb Squadron

1,278 Eighth Air Force heavy bombers attack fortifications, strong points, gun emplacements, and flak positions at Bordeaux, Royan, and other German defensive positions remaining along the French Atlantic coast. One B-24 is lost. The Royan mission is of interest in that it involves the first and only operational use of napalm bombs by Eighth Air Force heavy-bomber units. The results are negligible, and plans to drop more napalm from heavy bombers are canceled. -- 354th Fighter Group

A total of (54) 75-Gallon and (154) 85-Gallon canisters of Napalm was dropped along with (156) 100 pounders to act as a diffuser for the Napalm. Results of the mission were most satisfactory though the new weapons were noted to have very unpredictable falling tangent ballistics... -- 392nd Bomb Group

<***WARNING: POLITICAL CONTENT!!!***> This next bit is by Howard Zinn, historian and anti-war activist, who was a bombardier on a B-17 crew; follow the links at your own risk:

The raid on Royan was an even more difficult experience for me as I thought about it later. It was a situation where the war was just about over, a few months before the end of the war. We thought we weren't going to fly any more missions, because we had already overrun France, taken most of Germany, there was virtually nothing left to bomb, and everybody knew the war was going to be over in a few weeks. We were awakened at one in the morning, the usual waking up time if you're going to fly at six. It's not like in the movies where you leap out of bed into the cockpit, rev up the engines and you're off. Five boring hours of listening to briefings, getting your equipment, putting on your electrically heated suit, going to the bombardiers' briefing, the officers' briefing, going to eat and deciding whether you eat square eggs or round eggs. They briefed us and told us we were going to bomb this little town on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux, a town called Royan. They showed it to us on the map. Nobody asked why. You don't ask questions at briefings....It wasn't until later, when I did research into it after the war, that I realized that it was twelve hundred heavy bombers going over against two or three thousand German soldiers. But they told us in the briefing, You're going to carry a different time of bomb in the bomb bay. Not the usual demolition bomb. You're going to carry canisters, long cylinders of jellied gasoline. It didn't mean anything to us, except we knew jellied gasoline would ignite...

After the war, Daddy was stationed in Occupied Germany through 1945 and 1946, but I haven't done much research on that part of his service yet.