| OCR Text |
Show ROBERT THAYER D M 2002 I'd spend some time in the Flimsy office to see that they were coming along all right and then I'd go into the briefing room. Then the mission would take off-now say this would be, briefing at, as I recall, briefing was usually around two o'clock in the morning. And take-off would be somewhere between four, four-thirty, five o'clock, something like that. The planes would take off, and then I'd go back to the office, and then usually go backwell, first I went to the mess hall. I was eating four meals a day. I weighed 180 poundsthat's more than I ever weighed in my life (laughs). But I needed the energy. I wasn't getting good sleep because I'd go back, and then I'd be up about eight o'clock, and go over and eat breakfast again (laughs), and then come back, and then I'd have all my daily duties to go all through the day. And then about, oh, around three o'clock back up on the line, we had to interrogate them. And all the crews came into the interrogation room, and they had tables set up all around. Communications had a table, Ordnance, Armament, Intelligence, Operations, and the crews had to go through all those tables, and you had your set questions you asked them, but you had to interview every one of the crews. And at times we put up maybe thirty aircraft toward the end. So you'd have quite a group to go through, and then after that we had to send that information on up to headquarters. You know I shouldn't say this, because it sounds wrong, but it was the most interesting part of my life, the whole thing. I wanted to come home. I missed my wife, I missed my family. I thought I'd be coming back to working in construction-! didn't do that. But I was so involved, and I had a very responsible position, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and it's hard to say you enjoyed during wartime. I didn't like-oh, it was so sad, some of the crews; you'd lose good friends because we lost-we put up on the first Schweinfort mission in 1943, I think in the fall of '43-I've got it in there somewhere. We put up 25 |
