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My Dad was in the 100th and completed 47 missions. Hes gone now but his service will never be forgotton!! I LOVE YOU DAD!

All those guys has steel balls-the right stuff-they gave their all for our freedom. My great uncle flew P-38s and my other uncle was in the Battle of the Bulge. A bullet went into his jacket, traveled all the way around his waist and came out the other side. He did come home. Needless to say that his Guardian Angel was with him. I have the utmost respect for those who fought that war and all wars before or since.

/MrMarkRoads

I am 88 years of age, as a boy I lived close by one of the bomber stations, and I saw them fly out and fly back. The numbers coming back was always very much less than those who flew out. We children [as we were then] really looked up to the men when they were off base. They were kind and generous, to our call of "any gum chum" They were our heroes. I will never forget them: Remember we had just survived the brutal "blitz" when the Germans were decimating our towns and cities.

Before (yes, BEFORE) Dresden, the Germans bombed civilians to terrorize them and destroy their will to resist ---- in Guernica, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, London, Warsaw, Beograd, Bilboa, Wielun, Coventry, Portsmouth, Stalingrad, Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, Belfast, Gosport, Sheffield, Cardiff, Manchester, Ipswitch, Nottingham, Southampton, Swansea, and Plymouth. The Germans themselves invented the bombing of innocent civilians -----their first (and history's first) was London in 1915, bombed from a German dirigible, killing 7 and wounding 35. But why did the Allies do this to Dresden? It was surely an atrocity for its timing and ferocity. To paraphrase Nietzsche, “When you fight monsters, you become one yourself”. The level of hatred the Germans created for themselves in WW2 was so intense, it destroyed reason. The bible fortold it for them: “He who sows the wind, shall reap the whirlwind”. That was Dresden.

All things considered, war is hell.. and when you have a relentless foe bent on destroying everything in their path, you can only stop it by turning the people against those who started it to begin with.. and it was working. Just not fast enough. Sadly, when all our vets are gone, there will be no more witnesses to the atrocities committed. Why do you think Patton brought in photographers to the death camps.. because some yahoo is gonna say it never happened <- I'm paraphrasing. Doesn't any one remember the reports of ME262 pilots firing on SS Panzers for shooting their own ground troops on the Russian front? Yup, Hitler told them too. I have a great respect for all vets. They did the job a lot of others couldn't or wouldn't do. Most importantly, did we learn from it? I sure as hell hope we did.

A good friend though junior high and high school's dad was a belly gunner in a B17. In his 50 missions his plane went down 3 times. As a belly turret gunner you can't clamber out, put on a chute and bail out. He rode it in all 3 times without injury. Some crewmates were killed but he never even got the Purple Heart. I was a Pall Bearer when he died in his mid 50s. He had some great recollections, a 17 year-old boy that bombed Dresden.

He said he never got too scared because he never thought he would survive anyway. His son, my dear friend was a Marine Sergeant and would laugh and just say his dad was nuts from the high altitude flying. Old Stan was the only WW2 combat veteran that never drank nor smoked and was an atheist to boot. Too bad the WW2 vets are gone now. My 37 years with the DoD were interesting to say the least. Some heroes that didn't seem to care. They just did their job and went on with Life.

War is the most terrible and horrific thing. The enemy wants to kill you no matter what, so we have to defend ourselves and that's what our brave soldiers and pilots did. We didn't choose to have to do this, but the enemy will just keep on slaughtering and murdering decent folks. We cannot have this and we will fight and sacrifice our young men and women to achieve victory over the animals that started this. I can't imagine what our soldiers went thru but they saved us and because of those efforts we are safe in America and Europe is safer.