Sometime after my father died in
December, 1998, I was going through a few of his belongings and came across
an olive drab, military issue photo album with a gold eagle on the front and
bearing the title "Snaps and Scraps, My Life in the Army". Inside, among the
numerous photographs and newspaper clippings, was a snapshot which caught
my eye. It showed my father, at the time just a young man of 24, gathered
with the other members of his flight crew in front of a huge B-24 Liberator
bomber. Remembering the stories he had told me when I was a child, I resolved
to find out what I could about his experiences in World War II.
I was able to locate two surviving
members of dad's crew - Zenas Plymale, the flight engineer/top turret gunner
and Charles Laynor, the tail gunner, both of whom were very kind and helpful.
James Springer's daughter provided me with her father's tour log which gave
specific dates to events passed on to me orally through crew members, and
from my father's memoirs which he completed just before his death in 1998.
The log also listed other details such as the names of the transport ships
the crew took to Europe after they completed training, flak damage to their
aircraft, and the one injury to a crew member.
While the information on this site is probably representative
of many of the flight crews that served Europe and the Pacific, as much as
possible I have attempted to tell this crew's story using materials and information
provided by the crew members themselves.
There are many fine sites on the Internet
relating to this subject, and rather than produce pages of redundant information
here, I have provided links to other sites where I thought appropriate, as
well as on the LINKS page.
