Before the Storm

It was March, 1945, the worst of winter had passed, but the airfield remained cold, damp, and heavy with fog that clung to the runways. It was the kind of gray that blurred the days together—mission after mission, briefing after briefing. The war was shifting, they could feel it. The Allies were deep into Germany now, the Rhine River standing as the final threshold. But for the crews of the 392nd, and for the men of Hummel’s ship, the work wasn’t over. It was intensifying.

Early in the month, the Group lifted off toward Harburg. The target—an oil refinery south of Hannover—was one of the last feeding the German war machine. Eleven crews joined another group from the 14th Combat Wing, taking off before dawn under a cloudy, wet sky. Their bomb bays held over a hundred 500-pounders, but the weather refused to clear. The cloud cover forced a radar run. The bombs fell unseen through the haze, guided by faith in instruments and coordinates instead of sight. By early afternoon, the Liberators were home again—wet, weary, and grateful to have seen no fighters that day.

Five days later, they returned to the skies over Bielefeld, striking once more at the viaducts and rail lines feeding the front. It was a familiar target and a familiar frustration—thick cloud cover and no chance for visual bombing. The crews dropped through solid overcast, watching nothing but the soft glow of flak through the haze.

The very next morning, the men were back in the briefing room—this time for Kiel. The target: the submarine pens that had been silent on their maps for months. It was the first strike of its kind since the previous August. Thirty crews took off, loaded with nearly fifteen hundred bombs. The run was radar once again, but navigator reports later confirmed hits on the target area. There were no fighters, and the flak, while heavy, was inaccurate. The war below was clearly faltering.

By mid-March, the crews could feel the shift. The Luftwaffe was fading. Munster brought only scattered flak and no sign of enemy aircraft. The sky, once filled with danger, now felt oddly empty. The missions became routine: long hours, cold hands, radio chatter, and bomb releases into clouds. They were doing their job—methodical destruction—but the adrenaline that had carried them through the winter was being replaced by something heavier: fatigue.

Then came Neuburg. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone when they learned the target was a jet assembly plant—the same Me 262s that had cut through their formations just weeks earlier over Magdeburg. Twenty-one aircrews went out that morning. They bombed with precision, striking the airfield cleanly, and returned without a single hole in the plane. The enemy’s most advanced aircraft, once a terror in the sky, now lay burning on the ground. It was a symbolic victory, but still only one step closer to whatever came next.

March 21 brought one of the longest days of the war for the 392nd—a double mission day. Before dawn, the Group launched for Hesepe, an airfield north of Osnabrück. The Hummel crew was among them. The morning light was clear for the first time in weeks, the sun low over the horizon, and visibility good enough for a visual bomb run. As their plane leveled out over the target, the airfield came into view—hangars, runways, and the dark lines of aircraft below. When the bombs released, they could see the results instantly: explosions walking across the field, black smoke twisting into the sky. More than sixty percent of the airfield was destroyed. It was, for once, a clean and decisive mission.

When they returned to Wendling, they expected rest. Instead, the sound of engines filled the field again. Another mission was forming for the afternoon—this time to Essen. The Hummel crew stayed on the ground, watching as their fellow airmen took off into the late light. Flak was heavier there, and several bombers came home riddled with shrapnel holes, but every one of them returned alive. That night, the men were warned to watch for enemy intruders—German night fighters that sometimes followed the bombers home—but none appeared. The tension, though, lingered.

Two days later came Rheine. The marshalling yards were one of the last vital arteries of German transport. By now, the war’s pattern had become as predictable as it was relentless. The mission itself was almost flawless: every bomb released within two thousand feet of the aiming point, most within a thousand. No flak worth remembering, no fighters at all. Just efficiency. Precision. Silence.

But that silence didn’t last.

When the crews returned to Wendling that afternoon, the base was suddenly alive with motion. Trucks rolled in with crates and parachutes. Mechanics began reconfiguring bomb bays—not for explosives this time, but for supplies: food, ammunition, medicine, even jerry cans of fuel. A new mission was already being whispered about in the mess hall. A drop across the Rhine.

The calm of March had been deceptive. Beneath it, the war was shifting—building toward one final push that would test every ounce of faith, courage, and endurance. The storm was coming. And the Hummel crew would be right in the middle of it.