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April ^[[9]] 1974

Dear Wanda, Jessica and Ted:

Some time around August 1 the 88th moved 20 miles eastward.  The front had receded, and the move brought us nearer to it.  Our field was at an isolated farm, the Ferme Des Greves, on a plateau overlooking the Marne from the south.  The place had been overrun by the Germans in their final offensive of July 15th, but they were now at a safe distance to the north.  In a letter of 2 and 1/2 years ago (September 1971) I tried to describe the Ferme des Greves.

In the old farmhouse I shared a small room with another observer, John Jordan. He and I had become close friends. He came 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 at the observers' school to do aerial photography, but only Jordan and one other, Curtis Wheeler, ever took any pictures over German territory while I was with the 88th.  Air photographs were used to keep battle maps  up to date and to study for new enemy installations.  You were assigned a strip of German ground to cover.  You made a straight run over that strip at a constant altitude, exposing a dozen photographic plates at regular intervals.  The timing of those intervals was so calculated that you came out with the whole strip on a series of 12 plates overlapping slightly at the edges. The cameras of today would do that automatically, but aerial photography in 1918 was primitive. During his run of ten minutes or so the observer had to sit hunched over his camera, working a lever with one hand and holding a stopwatch in the other.  He could not keep a lookout for enemy chasse. So a plane on a photographic mission had to have a protective escort.

The logical course would have been to provide a posse of fighter planes to accompany the photographer. We tried that.  We found our American chasse quite willing to make appointments, but quite unreliable about keeping them. In my last letter I mentioned the only flight I ever made with a chase escort. On the day in September when I was shot down we had scheduled an escort from our First Pursuit Group, but it never showed up.  So we ^[[had]] adopted the practice of sending, with each photographic mission, three or four of our own two-seaters as protection for the camera man.

Jordan was a cool hand.  He could go through is routine without being distracted by anti-aircraft shells cracking around him,