ARMY AIR CORPS, FIRST IN GERMANY:
I believe I wrote about Jay Shumway, now a deceased member of VFW Post 5025, here in Crossville, but I couldn't find where. In any event, Jay was a Pearl Harbor survivor and went ashore on Omaha Beach on D-Day 1944. Jay constantly lamented that when he got to Paris, the Army Air Corps was already there. I constantly reminded him that we were tired of waiting for the ground forces to break out at St. Lo, so we just hopped over them and proceeded to Paris.
What Jay didn't know was, we bypassed him and had planes taking off and landing in Germany before the first ground units crossed the border. This came about when we departed Belgium and proceeded to Venlo, Holland. The airport at Veno straddled the border between Germany. . Maintenance and administration were located in Holland but the runways were in Germany. Consequently, our pilots were operating in Germany before the first infantry troops crossed. We never thought about it at that time but, we could have taken a stroll over at our leisure. That would have been kind of neat. (Copyright 2014 - Andrew M. Dolan)
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