September 12, 1944 – North Dakota – 0900

Charlie Miller looked at sixteen tankers sitting on the runway. He spent the last ten months training crews, then saw them fly off to war. Sixteen more would be ready to go to Europe tomorrow morning. By evening there would be sixteen new planes delivered by air and sixteen more crews would come in by bus, he would train them and in a month they would be gone. Of the sixteen planes, four were piloted by experienced crews.

He was just starting the paperwork for the transfers when the base commander came into the office. Mark Fuller was with the commander. The base commander was carrying a paper which he handed to Charlie. “Read this and tell me what you make of it.”

Charlie took the paper and read it at least twice before he looked up. The orders called for modifying the tankers on the runway to allow them to be refueled in the air and train the crews of those planes to be fuel recipients. Refueling a tanker seemed strange to Charlie but orders were orders.

“It looks like we want the tankers to be able to go a long way to refuel someone. Guess we had better get to it. And they want us to be ready to move out in five days.”

Charlie and the CO went to the maintenance area and got the modification process started. Then they called the crews together. Eight of them were designated to learn the refueling process.

By 1700 two days later all of the planes were modified and the training was completed. Charlie and the exec filed flight plans for Pearl and then Midway for the following day. They would fly there and be briefed on their mission.

September 15, 1944

When Captain Russell returned to the ship after the mission briefing he called the officers together then addressed the men. “You probably all know that some of our fly boys are making trips over Japan taking pictures. We need those pictures for a lot of reasons. They give us targets and tell us how we’re doing with our attacks, like on our last patrol they gave us pictures of the targets before and after the raid so we know if we’re doing the job. Now they have a problem and we’re going to solve it. About two hundred miles off the coast of Japan they have built an air base on an island. They have based high altitude fighters there and are experimenting with new models, trying to hit our planes. We believe they have shops there and there are engineers and technicians there working with the pilots. If we hit this island now we can set the work back possibly a year. We need that year, they tell me, and they didn’t tell me why, and the admiral told me he didn’t know why either. When they don’t tell you something like that in this navy it means it’s so important they can’t let you know. And let me assure you, when they don’t tell Admirals, it really is important.”