As a result of the failed exercise, Alkire was fired under the charge of incompetence and replaced with Colonel Howard M. One bomber went in the opposite direction and landed instead at Smyrna, Tennessee! Given that the pilot’s wife just happened to be in Smyrna, the crew’s wrong-way journey was probably not a gross navigation error. While some bombers made it to California, three ended up in Las Vegas-to include an embarrassed Col. However, given their ill-disciplined nature and patchwork training, the exercise was a fiasco, and the unit scattered across the western United States. Finally consolidated at Kearney Field, Nebraska on April 20, 1943, 21 crews of the 100th were supposed to fly some 1,300 miles from their home base to Hamilton Field near Novato, California. As part of their pre-deployment inspection, the Group conducted a long-range training exercise. We were undertrained and not as good as we thought we were.”īy early 1943, the unit prepared for movement overseas. Such hubris led one 100th BG navigator to quip, “We were all conceited and quite impossible. Taking their liberties, many of the crews were overconfident in their skills and airmanship. Instead of developing their individual and collective skills, aircrews took advantage of the lack of oversight and sought more puerile pursuits over professional. With a full complement of 37 aircraft, the men of the 100th began to familiarize themselves with their new mounts as they jumped from base to base with a training schedule that was disjointed and poorly coordinated. You’re going to be baby-killers and women-killers.” Addressing the crews, he said, “Don’t get the notion that your job is going to be glorious or glamorous…you’ve got dirty work to do, you might as well face the facts. Alkire was a stern commander who painted a grim picture of what lay ahead. At the same time the new planes arrived, the unit organized itself into four squadrons, with Colonel Darr H. Despite its activation earlier in the year, the unit did not receive its first B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers until November. I haven’t got a chance.”Įstablished on January 28, 1942, and activated on June 1, the Group’s personnel began to assemble at Walla Walla Army Air Base in Washington the unit was subsequently stationed at several different locations. Upon receipt of his posting, he told a companion while sobbing, “I’m not going to make it…they just put me in the 100th Group. Highlighting this expectation in late 1943, a new airman was assigned to the 100th BG. Its reputation was well known throughout VIII Bomber Command as a jinxed unit, with the chances of surviving a tour of 25 missions appearing as a dim possibility. For the US Army Air Forces during World War II, this kind of reputation was earned by members of the Eighth Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group (BG).Īs a part of the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO) over Europe, the “Bloody 100th” appeared to suffer disproportionately at the hands of the German Luftwaffe, with its members both respected and pitied by fellow bomber crews. The US Army’s 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne, USS Indianapolis, after delivering the atomic bomb to Tinian, or the 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal, are examples of military units experiencing exceptional hardship but being treated with sympathetic yet reverent tones. Either by mission, assignment, or the fates, such hapless organizations often achieve a kind of legendary yet revered status among its sister units. In most military services, there are usually those units that stand out as unlucky, unfortunate, or destined for unfortunate consequences. (for example, a link back to their website).Top Photo: A B-17 Flying Fortress of the Eighth Air Force's 100th Bomb Group flying toward Germany, Feb. The license to see if the designer is requesting attribution This icon can be used for both Personal &Ĭommercial purposes and projects, but please check Converting it to an ICO, JPEG or WebP image format or file type should also be pretty simple (we hope to add that feature to Iconduck soon). If you need this icon available in another format, it should be pretty straight forward to download it as an SVG image file, and then import it into apps like Adobe XD, Crello, RelayThat or Snappa. The following styles have this icon in it: Solid It's part of the icon set " Font Awesome Icons", which has 1,612 icons in it. It's available to be downloaded in SVG and PNG formats (available in 256, 512, 10 PNG sizes). This open source icon is named "Bomb" and is licensed under the open source CC BY 4.0 license.
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