Lee E. Tucker, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Winston P. Erickson, May 19, 2000: Saving the legacy tape no. 13 and 14

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LEE E. TUCKER M 19 2000 breaking up a tank attack, for instance, on our infantry position. Things like that. That was our main duty, and we would have a mission come down that said we need twelve airplanes on an armed reconnaissance mission, and you would fly between so and so certain coordinates. We would take off and we would have eight fighters armed with bombs and we would have four fighters flying top cover in case the German fighters attacked us. We would fly over the German countryside to see if we spotted trains or a barge on the Rhine River or anything like that, and they would go down and kill it. That was the main mission. WIN: They wouldn't give you a briefing and say, "This is the target?" LEE: We had that occasionally, yes. We would say, "Okay, now the armies are going to start a big push here and your target is this railroad junction. Here we want that completely knocked out, so there can't be any German reinforcements coming up." WIN: So they had you try and knock out bridges? LEE: Yes, we tried for about nine months to knock out a bridge over the Rhine River, and when I went back afterwards, it was still standing. We had bombed every German field within a mile of that thing, I think, and never hit the bridge. WIN: When you are flying, it's hard to discern exactly which troops are which. LEE: Well, yes, it is very difficult. In fact, I have been shot at by our flak gunners in our army. Not me personally, but our air force had strafed our own troops and bombed them. It was a terrible mix up, but those things, you know, there is no way to stop that. The way we did it in Europe, our people had orange panels, our ground troops. If we were going to 29