Developing 398th Crew Member Mission Lists
You have found a page and process that is underdevelopment and will take many many months to complete. Please be patient as we carefully and methodically proceed.
Dave Jordan
October 13, 2010
A common inquiry among many visiting our sites is how to obtain a list of a particular veteran's missions, aircraft, and crewmembers. While we have developed a few of these, it turns out that it is a long and somewhat tedious process, especially if one doesn't know the actual flown mission days. The purpose of this page is to provide a process along with links to available on-line data so that you can do this yourself.
398th Missions Table Examples
First let's begin by showing a few examples of what has and can be done.
First you might want to take a look at the Jordan's Missions and Full Crew Listing that I created for my dad's missions. This downloadable .pdf file shows all Lt. Edward C. Jordan's missions, what position he performed, and who the other crew members were. The spreadsheet was created using data from the 398th Bomb Group Historical Data. Fortunately when I began, I had a list of the missions he had flown. Thus I could focus on searching the data for only those days he flew to search out who he flew with, what position he was in, and what aircraft he flew. This is not quite as easy as it sounds because of the way the records are organized and the fact that many records are very hard to read. But with determination it can be done.
To see a few more examples of what others have done, see our 398th Missions by Individuals and Crews page.
Determing the Crew
The key to determining the mission days your veteran flew is to identify which crew he flew with. In the easiest case, your veteran was the pilot. In the next easiest case, the same crew members flew all their missions together. This later case was largely true, though many times there were a few replacement members due to illness, death, and promotion. The hardest case is if your veteran was the one getting promoted and moved around from crew to crew. This was actually the case with Ed Jordan. In the beginning he was co-pilot on the Hopkins crew. But as he gained experience, management had him flying with other crews, and also breaking in new pilots on their first mission. Eventually he had his own crew. Fortunately most cases are not like this.
If you don't know it from family history. As follows are a couple of ways:
- If you are lucky to have your own crew photo, it may name the crew.
- Use our 398th Web Site Searches page in our Tips section to search for your veteran on the 398th site or look for him directly in various data table.
- Search methodically in our 398th Identified Crew Photos crew by crew.
- If your veteran flew anytime between the end of May 1944 and the end of January 1945, there are a set of 9 398th Bomb Group Statistical Reports in our 398th Bomb Group Information page. At the end of each of these reports are the list of crews at the end of each of these 9 months. If you can find your veteran, you will not only know the crew but can also bound the months that he flew.
Getting Most of the Mission Days
If you know the crew or can determine it using the technique above and want to know which days a veteran flew, there is a very nice trick to identifying most days with a high degree of accuracy. The trick is to study our Formation Charts.
TEST LINK: Will not make sense at this point as being used by webmaster to test ideas. Geoff and Lee, this leads to a page which allows one to:
- get to each mission day and subsequently its formation chart
- some of the 398th detailed data for some mission days.
More work needed to fix it up if we want to go this route.