Chowhound: George McLeod - 349th Pilot
George W. McLeod - 349th Pilot - E-Z Goin'
The following is a from a letter home after George's first Chowhound mission, May 1, 1945. His crew participated in the three flights of May 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. They were very rewarding and memorable experiences for all the 100th.
I took part in a mission today which was not in the line with the usual task of heavy bombers. I suppose tomorrow’s newspapers at home will be full of accounts of the mission. Today our bomb bays contained no high explosives but were loaded instead with food parcels.
We flew in low over Holland, still enemy territory, to deliver our load to a portion of the starving Dutch people. Only a few hundred feet above the ground, we really saw things first hand over there. I saw hundreds of people waving as waving as we passed over settlements, towns and cities along our course. They fairly danced in the streets and there were more flags to the breeze than I had ever seen before. I couldn’t help getting a lump in my throat and a drop or two in the ol’ eyes to look down and see people so grateful.
I even saw German gunners at their position waving to us. Sights you wouldn’t believe. A man with a horse and wagon was the most amusing thing to see as he raced along a road toward the falling parcels from our planes. Boy, was he standing up on that buck board and making that horse really pick ‘em up and lay ‘em down! There were two other incidents that were funny too. Saw lots of people waving articles of clothing and men took off their pants to hold in the breeze. There were women too on top of a flat building waving an outstretched white sheet. It looked like they wanted us to drop parcels right in their laps. Here in England, cows and horses never pay attention to airplanes, but over there its quite another matter. Boy, those horses would run for three hundred yards when we passed. I saw one horse run right into a canal and then swim back to shore. A lot of the country has been flooded by the Germans and it is a miserable looking sight. It will take a long time to repair the dykes and reclaim the Dutch lands.
I feel like I really did something constructive today instead of blasting some place to blazes.