OPERATION BODENPLATTE

CHAPTER 11 up my grandfather may have been at Airfield A87 Charleroi, Belgium because that is where the 67th Tactical Recon Group was located (they were there from September 1944 - March 1945). We don’t really know for sure.

Regardless, one of the stories that my mom remembers my grandfather talking about was how “he was on a landing strip near the fuel drop, and the Airfield started to get bombed.” She also mentioned that he would also talk about how he remembers the “bombing of the landing strip and he went AWOL one day to go find his cousin who was a nurse in France and he went to spend the day with her.” Out of everything we have researched, his stories must be related to being at an Allied Airfield during Operation Bodenplatte while in Belgium and he was at an Airfield that was attacked. So, yet again, I am going to conclude that my grandfather was a part of something important and yet again, his story is evolving into more than I could have ever imagined. There was just one other lead left that I had no answer for regarding my grandfather’s comments to my mom about the war. Well, at least everything that she could remember anyway. My grandfather told her once that he was “driving fuel trucks to resupply airplanes when they liberated one of the large concentration camps.” Now this lead did not mean much to me when I heard it at the time, but as you know how this story goes… the rabbit hole was about to get a whole lot bigger and, yet again, to a whole new level.