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We saw the sleeping quarters, dugouts cut deep into the hillside and with roofs reinforced with heavy timbers.  Then there was a long conference, of which I understood but little.  The question before the house was what the Germans were up to.  Notes were compared on what the infantrymen had seen and heard; what the observers had seen from the air, and on a series of recent aerial photographs.

A week or two later the infantrymen returned our call.  They were a mixed party of commissioned officers and sergeants.  They had lunch with us (the sergeants ate with our pilots, most of whome were non-coms).  Then the sergeants, and one or two of the officers, were taken on flights over their own positions to judge for themselves how good their camouflage was.  These back-and-forth visits obviously helped toward intelligent cooperation between the airmen and the infantry.

Here let me jump ahead of my narrative, to say that this kind of communication was at first totally lacking in the American forces.  Partly, no doubt, this was because the American divisions that summer were not working on quiet sectors with time for social amenities.  But also it was something we had to learn for ourselves, the hard way.  In August, when the Germans had been pushed out of their entrenched positions and were being driven slowly backward, we found ourselves working with the American 77th division.  Its infantrymen never responded to our signals.  It was not their fault, for no one had thought to tell them what the signals meant.  They did not even recognize our planes as American.  Very likely they thought that the rockets we fired in the air in front of them were some devilish new German weapon.  Not knowing how to distinguish an allied from a German plane, they simply shot at any that came within range.

Soon after that division moved in our fliers of the 88th began to suspect that we were being shot at by our nominal friends.  The evidence was circumstantial, but cogent.  When reconnoitering over German territory we usually flew high enough to be beyond reach of machine guns or rifles on the ground.  On coming back to our own side we descended to near tree-top levels, to drop a written report at division headquarters.  Planes returning from such missions more than once showed fresh bullet holes.  One day the last doubt was removed from my mind.  Flying at a low altitude well inside our lines I felt the normal