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the 167th French division.  I described that kind of operation in a letter I wrote to you in August 1972.  Neither Douglas nor I had ever done it before, but we had been drilled rather thorougbly on how it should be performed.  Littauer offered to each of us his choice of pilots. Douglas had first choice.  I have forgotten WHOM HE TOOK.  I chose Victor Heilbrunn.  We had others more skilled than he at handling a plane, but pilots were apt to object to flying close to the ground in German territory.  We would have to do that on this ^[[mission]].  I know that Victor would go where I asked him to without arguing.  Our orders were that Douglas was to take off asd early on the 18th as it was light enough to see clearly.  I was to follow him exactly an hour later.

The front of the 167th division centered on the village of Torcy, just left of Belleau.  In fromt of the 167th the Germans had the strongest position on that part of the battlefront.  The French would first have to cros a small stream, then a narrow-gauge railway track.  Then they would have to climb Hill 193 (the number simply tells the altitude of the hill, in meters).  The rounded face of the hill was high and steep.  It had clumps of bushes, excellent cover for machine guns, nearly all the way to the top.  Then you came to open ground which extended to the village of Monthiers, two or three hundred yards beyond the brow of the hill.

In preparation for an attack each division always had a time schedule which it hoped to meet in reaching successive objectives. By the time Douglas arrived on the scene the infantry of the 167th was scheduled to be halfway to the top of Hill 193. An hour later, when I was to get there, they were supposed to have passed the brow of the hill and to be approaching Monthiers.  If they had been sure in advance of meeting that schedule, Douglas and I would not have been needed  More often than not such schedules went haywire after an attack had started. We were there to find out, if possible, where the foremost men of the attacking infantry had actually gone. That information was needed especially by the French artillery, so that their barrage could be placed effectively.  Douglas's plane and mine both carried markings of which the French infantry had been informed in advance, and wich would identify us as belonging to their division.

I don't remember how well I slept tht night, if at all.  I remember climbing with Heilbrunn into his plane, a few minutes early, and looking at our watches until we got the word to take off. And I can never forget the flight to the front that morning.