10/25/43 Mission:
XII Air Support Command, NATBF and RAF DAF concentrate on blocking roads and destroying bridges; town areas, vehicles, radio stations, trains, and vessels are also attacked; targets attacked are in or near Frosinone, Formia, Gaeta, Cetraro, along the Sangro River, Kuna, along the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia, W of Lagosta Island and S of Rome; Tarquinia Airfield is also bombed.
10/25/43 V-Mail, Italy
Hello Angel:
It is a pleasant morning and Jackson and Gene and I have been perusing the papers. I scan them, then for days will read various stories and articles.
So you’d rather be a house wife than a career girl. Well, that’s why I married you instead of hired you. And I’d rather be a husband than most anything I can think of.
There’s a new expression over here, in compliance with proper streamlining of units; there has now been formed a CHAIR-BORNE DIVISION. It consists of all those 4F people and slightly jaundiced pilots who so enthusiastically haunt the rear area.
Sometime ago, about 200 heavies* went on a 2000-mile raid. When they got to the target area, they found that the factories and things they were to hit were not there at all. Rather than kill a bunch of innocent civilians, they brought their load home, landing at our field for gas before going back to where they were based. At the time, I could have shown them an area not 30 miles away so packed with Jerries that anything you dropped would hit one. Of course, when we bomb, Jerry is so thick that we never bring rocks home even if we can’t find the target. Boy, that load from 200 heavies would have advanced our lines 15 miles.
Looking back at Pearl Harbor, the tactics the Jap bombers used were awful. Had our forces there been given proper ack-ack training, the little Nips would all have been shot out of the skies in a few minute’s time. Ack-ack out there still isn’t up to the German level.
All the magazines are playing up how poor the German army is. We up here would like for said magazines to be dropped on Jerry to let him in on the secret. Over-optimism is a dangerous weapon. I wish people back there would realize there is a hard war to fight and quit glamorizing all the people who are sacrificing their social life to work in a factory, of course at a modest $600/mo.
I still love you, Cy.
*Heavy bombers, such as the B-17, B-24, B-29.
