USMC took off from A103 with 11 B24 formations. We had two gunners on board, Sled who was host CM, and WMsharp who was observing his first FSO event. We had some confusion at first but got everyone organized and flying in the right direction. Kool and his group were our cover for the night and they did a fantastic job. Orders were to climb to 25K, but we cut it short to only 23K in order to get to the target under 1 Hour. We encountered 2-3 109’s before V19, but they did not have any effect since our escorts chased them away. Unfortunately, the visibility was bad, and we missed V19 cause we could not see it, so we descended to 17K and took aim on A18. Approaching A18, we ran into 6-10 109's defending. They managed to score 8 of our B24's, before Kool and his flight of P38's neutralized them. We lost some B24’s and P38’s to friendly fire I believe here. I tore off the wings of my lead bomber leveling after the decent to 17K, but continued on with only two B24’s.
The decent left us too fast to calibrate and line up for a drop, so only one or two B24’s dropped an egg with zero results. We continued to fight off the remnants of the attack as we extended to the SE. At this point we had lost two full formations, one to a disconnect, and another to enemy action possibly. We had also lost 5 B24’s from various other formations. We regrouped turned around and went back to A18. This time we got three hangers on the big pad. We continued to V19 where we got all 3 hangers there. Then we turned around to try to hit A18 for the third time.
We were conserving our eggs for A114 so only two people dropped on the remaining hangers. One hit, and one missed, leaving one hanger at A18. We decided to send JRCCrow down to finish it off, which he did with the help of Eagle in his escorting P38. The rest of us continued on to A114, which had been untouched by earlier attacks.
In order to make an Eastern approach, we went due south for a couple sectors then turned west. It is possible we avoided enemy con’s patrolling between A114 and A18 since it seemed active there. We dropped all we had on A114 in a single pass since there was no time to try again. We hit all but one target. The missed hanger was due to the fact that my eggs landed on Hopper16’s flight of three B24’s and completely wiped out his formation. We were both assigned to hit the same target, and unnoticed by me, he passed below and behind my flight, directly in the path of my recently released bombs. I had never seen this before, and was completely unaware that it could happen. Hopper had flown a great mission and deserved to land his planes. We then began a long decent to our return base, and landed just before the frame ended without contacting any enemy fighters. We all had a great time.
End result, 14 out of 15 Hangers destroyed at three enemy bases.
