67TH TACTICAL RECON GROUP

Chapter 9

beach so that at high tide, invading ships would not see them and the metal points would pierce ships and get them stuck right before the beach to become easy targets. Have you ever played the old school Jacks game? It is the game where you have a bunch of metal X shaped spikes on the ground and have to bounce a small ball and pick up as many as you could before the ball hit the ground again. The Czech hedgehogs looked just like the Jacks. However, the Jacks game was not made based on the Czech hedgehogs of World War II. Actually, the Jacks game was invented around 1190 B.C. around the time of the Trojan War.

After the landings at Normandy, the Allied ground forces received constant backup from the air with the help of tactical air support from visual and photo recon planes, as well as from the fighter planes. Peck said, “We the 67th were the first air units on the beachhead. We were located at a small French town called Le Molay, just behind the front line. The only problem we had was that artillery was all around us. But fortunately, they didn’t hit our air base. Our P-51s had a large camera in the tail, the K-17, with a 24-inch focal length. But the small camera behind the pilot shot to the side and down, taking what we called an oblique rather than a straight-down shot. Our P-38s had three big K-17 cameras. The first one was at an angle to the left of five degrees, the next one shot straight down, and the one behind took pictures at an angle the other way to the right of five degrees. The result from high altitude was that you could take an aerial path ten miles wide and get excellent detail. With the P-38s, we did the whole front line every day, weather permitting, to located targets for artillery and fighter bombers. As we were flying over the Atlantic near the Normandy beachhead, I would often think of my brother, Charlie, who was an engineering officer on the Destroyer Grayson serving in the Pacific. Here we were, both in our twenties, with a tremendous responsibility in our hands at such a young age.”

The 67th’s primary mission after D-Day called for complete aerial photographic coverage of the First Army’s front to a depth of ten miles behind the enemy lines on a daily basis. “Not only were our photographs made and distributed to all ground units,” Peck said, “but we developed an entirely new procedure of synthetic projection of vertical photographs on oblique grids.”

To help track my grandfather’s travels, I was able to find a station list and time frame of the 67th Tactical Recon Group while in England and throughout Europe. Just like Peck mentioned in that book, their first location was Le Molay. That was listed on the list I found and the remainder of their base locations is as follows (I also provided a Google map picture and connected the dots to give you an idea of his travel path):

September 1942 - Membury, England

December 1943 - Middle Wallop, England

July 1944 - Le Molay, France

August 1944 - Toussus le Noble, France

September 1944 - Gosselies, Belgium (Charleroi)

March 1945 - Vogelsang, Germany (Remagen, Germany - may have been a temporary station along Rine River)

April 1945 - Limburg an der Lahn, Germany

April - July 1945 - Eschwege, Germany

I was able to come across an article on a website called historyofwar.org that pretty much verified all of my research but added some detail here and there. It really highlights the heroic deeds of the 67th Tactical Recon Group and, by proxy, the heroic deeds of my grandfather’s Detachment Unit for their side-by-side service and support to the 67th Tactical Recon Group. It is as follows and helps to put everything in order:

“The 67th Reconnaissance Group flew with the 8th and 9th Air Forces during the campaign in Europe in 1944-45, taking part in the D-Day campaign, the advance through France, the Battle of the Bulge, and the final invasion of Germany. The group was activated in the United States in September 1941. Only three months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the group was pressed into service, flying antisubmarine patrols off the U.S. East Coast.

In January 1942, the group began to train for a move overseas and it moved in August - October 1942. At