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^[[28 28]]  April 9, 1974

Dear Alice:

Somewhere around August 1 the 88th moved 20 miles eastward. The move brought us nearer to the front, which had been receding. Our field was at an isolated farm, the Ferme des Gréves, on a plateau that overlooked the Marne from the south.  The place had been overrun by the Germans in their final offensive of July 15, but they were not at a safe distance to the north.  In a letter of two and a half years ago (September 1971) I tried to described the Ferme des Gréves.

In the old farmhouse I shared a small room with another observer, John Jordan. He and I had become close friends. He was from Indianapolis and had gone to the University of Indiana.  He had become the Number one camera man of the squadron.  All of us had been trained in serial photography at the observers' school, but it happened that on photographic missions after the 88th went to the front.  They had performed so well that they kept getting more assignments, Jordan especially.  Only those two ever took pictures over the German lines while I was with the 88th.

Air photographs were much used, to study for new enemy installations and keep battlemaps up to date.  The squadron would get an order for photographs of a designated strip of German territory.  That meant flying in a straight course and at a constant, recorded altitude over the strip, and taking a series of pictures so timed that they overlapped at the edges only.  Nowadays such pictures would be made on film, with a camera that can be set for successive exposures at any desired intervals.  In 1918 aerial photography was primitive.  Jordan's camera was loaded with a magazine containing 12 glass photographic plates.  He had to figure out what time interval should be allowed between exposures, since that varied with the altitude and the speed of flight.  During a run of 8 or 10 minutes he had to sit hunched over his camera, working a lever with one hand and holding a stopwatch in the other.  That meant that he could not keep a lookout for enemy planes.  Nor could the pilot, who had to keep the plane on an exact course and who had a very poor view toward the rear anyway.  A plane doing photography needed a protective escort.

The logical course would have been to provide an escort of chasse planes for each photographic mission.  We tried that.  We found our