Journey Between Mountains

May 10, 1945 D-day + 02, 1945

Dearest Folks,

I hope when you get this letter you will enjoy following me as I take the tour of a lifetime.  I had the fortunate privilege of being a passenger in a B-17 to view some of the high spots of the European battle grounds including France, Belgium, and Germany.  How wonderful and exciting it was the night I was told to report for briefing at 7:30 a.m., two days after V-E Day. The plane was piloted by a good friend of long standing, Lieut. Edward Post, and the navigator was Lieut. Stewart, whom I also know and like very much. I stood between the copilot and pilot during the taxi around the perimeter and then watched our takeoff with breathless excitement; my first trip ever! I watched for our house and the castle across the road from it and for the near by towns and saw the many roads to Deenethorpe and other air bases. We circled the field for quite a while until our group was in formation which consisted of nine other planes. All during our formation procedure there were other squadrons taking off and settling themselves at different altitudes. Our engineer was shooting off flares as signals and other lead ships were doing the same in the other squadrons. What a splendid victorious occasion it must have been for the cautious inhabitants of the little surrounding towns in England! I was equipped with a parachute harness, and a head set. We were finally ready to go when over the intercom the sound of a typical American tongue-in-cheek message was heard, “Churchill will blow his stack at 1500 hours announcing V-E-Day" Well, we started for the coast and I was just all eyes, and wishing I could talk to someone, feeling somewhat frustrated because I couldn’t because of the noise! I thought England was beautiful from the air. The navigator pointed out, by soundless conversational directions pointing to the map and, the ground and so we learned the names of different fields and towns as we passed over them and gave our time for leaving the coast. We Finally came to the North Sea and started across the channel. It was exciting to see convoys below and mine sweepers trailing white foam, then nothing for miles but the sea. The sun was shining and I was getting warm, when the navigator came up and asked me to come down into the nose; so I joined several other passengers and sat in the bombardier’s seat. We were nearing Ostend on the Belgium coast, when our comedic navigator, Stewart said, “ Approaching the enemy coast, don all flak suits.” For a moment I knew what it must have felt like for a crew on a real run and I got a really spooky feeling! We saw a lot of damage there and when Dunkerque was mentioned disheartened feelings came over me . . . feelings that intensified as each of the outstanding battle points were mentioned. It was too far away to see, so we continued across Belgium down to Lille, France, then back into