Words Woven with Purpose

It was March, 1945, the worst of winter had passed, but the airfield remained cold, damp, and heavy with fog that clung to the runways. It was the kind of gray that blurred the days together—mission after mission, briefing after briefing. The war was shifting, they could feel it. The Allies were deep into Germany now, the Rhine River standing as the final threshold. But for the crews of the 392nd, and for the men of Hummel’s ship, the work wasn’t over. It was intensifying. Ea

B-24 #42-51958 of the 579th Squadron, piloted by 1st Lt. Roy L. Miller, departs the target area over Magdeburg, Germany, following the mission of March 3, 1945. They’d been here before. The men of the Hummel crew, flying their worn B-24 with the 579th Squadron, had struck Magdeburg the day before. But when dawn broke over Wendling on March 3, 1945, orders came to finish the job. The synthetic oil plant northeast of the city—one of Germany’s last lifelines—had to be erased fro

At 9:30 a.m. on March 1, 1945, thirty B-24 Liberators lifted off from Wendling Airfield on what would become one of their longest missions—nine hours round trip to the rail yards at Ingolstadt, just south of Nuremberg. It was the Tucker crew’s seventh mission together. The target was vital to German supply lines, but low clouds smothered the region once again, forcing the bombardiers to drop their 500-pounders through radar rather than sight. No flak. No fighters. No explosio