For fourteen months we had looked for it and here it was - the next best place to home.  Everything you find in the travel books from warm, ocean bathing on a clean, sandy beach to mountain scenery, hunting and fishing.  When the Colonel comes back with some farmers’ fattened sow he’s still been “hunting” wild boar.

 

The low-level volunteers who started their legalized buzzing at Paestum have inoculated the whole group.  Now when a beautifully perfect echelon or even the whole damn formation comes over low enough to blow the sugar off the American Red Cross donuts, we know without listening to the radio that they’re saying, “Mission completed, bridges finito!”

 

And while we’re on the subject, let’s give the Red Cross a great big hand.  We got our first regular installation at Pompeii and it has been a permanent institution ever since.

 

With bombs away, it’s a “so long, flak; hello donuts and coffee”.  And were they lifesavers after those long, paralyzingly cold rides of last spring!  And the generous portions of smiles, conversation and wise-cracks served along with the coffee and sinkers, by three dainty bits (American) of femininity pep up morale to no end.

 

If we seem to be more or less content with our lot at present, don’t get the idea that all has been balm of Gilead here.  Jerry welcomed us after our first few days with an all-out raid that sent even the combat crews to emulating the mole.  Picks and shovels were at a premium and many were the designs of shelters.

 

Once again we were practically wiped out of ships and other equipment as well as heavily hit on tentage.  There were personnel losses too.

 

But by energetic patching and scraping, by midafternoon we had a mission in the air and the grim desire for revenge simply gave added accuracy to the bombardier’s’ aim.

 

Again the 12th Air Force came through fast and handsomely and before the Jerry Todt battalions could patch a bridge, we were back over the bomb line in full formation.

 

By July, we had hit an all-time high with a record for hits that will require some doing for any group to better.  But we’re out to do it ourselves in this very month of August.

 

Sure we’ve “bitched” – at locations, at food, at many things.  That’s what makes us the fightingest group.  We watch the men on the line baby their ships like blooded horseflesh – it’s the itching urge for perfection – no matter whether it’s rolling seen straight passes or knocking out a pinpoint bridge – that will help us continue to be top contributors to the war effort.  Neither Jerry raids nor old Vesuvius herself kept us out longer than it took to get our wind.  So where do we go from here?