This website was put online March 22, 1999 as a tribute to the Books Crew using the research of Jim Marsteller. A few weeks later in April of that year, additional material of aircrews, missions and missing air crew reports from Col. Robert Vickers research was added. Then two months later in June researcher Ben Jones joined the team with his research of the Wendling base, photos and their crews. Greg Hatton also joined the team in June bringing a wealth of his POW research to the site. These four men, Marsteller, Vickers, Jones, and Hatton, with their research have provided the foundational information found on this website.
The 392nd BGMA adopted the site as the official website of the 392nd Bomb Group in October of 1999. Since then the website continues to develop with responsive coding, content, researchers and resources. Click here to view past & present individual who contributed research & time developing this website.
The website contains:
by Keith Roberts
Editor's (Jim Goar) Note: Keith Roberts, 578th naviagtor, 392BGMA Director, tour director, and a pretty fair kind of ink-slinger authored this history of the 392nd website.
During the 1988 392™ tour back to Wendling, Ben Jones, a 14 year old English teenager from nearby Litcham, chased our tour buses around our old airfield on his bicycle. He finally caught us outside the old Combat Officers' Mess building, told us that he had recovered pieces of a P-38 which had crashed on the field, and asked if the pilot was on the tour. J. D. Long took the pieces, gift wrapped them, and presented them to pilot Pat McCarthy at our next reunion. From then on, Ben Jones, still a teenager, rode buses on our tours and in 1992 made a special presentation at our welcome banquet in King's Lynn.
On that 1992 tour was a 45 year old Pennsylvanian, Jim Marsteller, who, with his cousin Jim Morris, was researching information about their uncle, S/Sgt Everette Morris, the engineer on the crew of pilot 1/Lt Dallas Books, a 392™ crew which was shot down and crashed in Germany on the Friedrichshafen raid of March 18, 1944.
Jim Marsteller and Ben Jones met in Wendling on the 1992 tour and became friends. They later went to Germany, found the crash site of the Books crew and interviewed German eyewitnesses. Jim found that Dallas Books had been a resident of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and sent his research information to the Eau Claire newspaper which published the story.
Bob Books, the son of pilot Dallas Books, read the story and contacted Marsteller. Bob was a scientist and an early computer expert who talked with Jim about using the information to create a website as a tribute to the Books crew.
By now Jim Marsteller and Ben Jones had been going to 392™ reunions, and at a reunion they met Greg Hatton, the son of Sgt Hyman Hatton, a gunner on the Ofenstein crew which went down on the Berlin mission of April 19, 1944. Hatton had done extensive research on his father's moving story as a POW. He also evidenced interest in creating a website as a tribute to his father.
These second generation 392™ men, Jim Marsteller, Ben Jones, Bob Books, and Greg Hatton, have put together our 392™ website, one of the largest research websites in the world, a website which has welcomed over 12,000 visitors to date www.b24.net. We owe them, our everlasting gratitude.
You absolutely must visit www.b24.net. You will find accounts of all 392™ missions, the fate of all missing 392" air crew members, the compelling stories of Marsteller's and Hatton's researches, pictures and descriptions of Wendling as it looks today, the touching story of the Vickers crew bailout and return to the French crash site of the Niagara Special, and hundreds of previously unpublished photographs of 392™ people and places.
