Chapter 1: Grenier Field
By: Andy Dunn
Tags: World War II, Love Letters, Love, American History, Military

In later years Mom would tell the story of how she and Dad first met at Grenier Field Army Air Force [AAF] base in New Hampshire where she was a flight nurse and he was a recovering surgical patient. However, there are two conflicting accounts of how Dad initially acquired the injury that put him on the path to Mom’s medical ward.

Back in August of 1942, when Dad was 2nd Lieutenant Charles W. Dunn, Jr., he had arrived in England with advance units of the United States 8th AAF, in his case with the 92nd Bomb Group at Bovingdon in Hertfordshire. The original American battle plan had been to attack targets in Nazi occupied Europe in broad daylight so that the bombs could be aimed optically. However, this strategy failed to take into account the high percentage of days during which northern Europe is hidden by cloud cover, especially during the winter months. Consequently, by 1943 the 8th AAF began work on the adaptation of British H2S airborne radar — already in use by the Royal Air Force [RAF] in its own nocturnal bombing campaign — for installation on American planes. On August 20, 1943 the 482nd Bomb Group was formed for the purpose of providing “pathfinding” — that is, radar targeting — services to the other groups within the 8th AAF. A week later Dad was transferred to this new 482nd Bomb Group, specifically to its 813th Squadron. The 482nd was located at Alconbury, a village of less than 500 people located about a half hour by car from the university town of Cambridge. No doubt he was selected for this new assignment because of his strong academic background in mathematics and the physical sciences.

At the same time, the 8th AAF had a policy that bomber crewmen must complete 25 missions to finish out a combat tour and thus become eligible for rotation back to the States. In Untold Valor: Forgotten Stories of American Bomber Crews Over Europe in WWII, Rob Morris reported

In the early months of the [American bombing] war . . . the chances of a crewman completing the obligatory twenty-five missions were almost non-existent. Assuming a loss rate of four percent per mission, no aircrews would survive to complete their tours. Even at a loss rate of only two percent per mission, a man had only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Early in 1943, aircrews over Europe were suffering losses of 8 percent per mission . . . .¹

At the end of a mission, the surviving flyers who returned to base could see for themselves only the extent of their own unit’s losses. According to what Mom later told me, the AAF was deliberately understating overall losses in the hope of misleading the aircrews within each bomb group into believing that only they had been unlucky. If so, such a cover-up could not hide the truth indefinitely. By the autumn of 1943 the entire 8th AAF was obliged to temporarily reduce operations. Dad could do the math. Fearful for his life, he volunteered to be among the three pathfinder crews from the 482nd that were being selected to return to the States to learn more about H2X. His application was approved. However, after his request was approved, but before actually returning to the States, he broke his ankle — badly. It is at this point in Dad’s account that a discrepancy exists between his own explanation for the circumstances of his injury and what was subsequently heard from other sources. According to Dad himself, he had suffered the injury during an off-duty volleyball match. However, back in the late eighties when my brother Bob conducted his own research into Dad’s military records, he exchanged correspondence with several 8th AAF veterans who had flown with Dad. At least one of these gentlemen recalled things differently. According to this alternate account, Dad had, while off duty, gotten so drunk that he inadvertently rode a bicycle off a country bridge. I am not sure what to make of this revisionist history. For one thing, I never observed him consume an excessive amount of alcohol. For another, I don’t recall him denying a shortcoming when confronted by a credible accusation to that effect. So, on the one hand, the drunken bicyclist story does not seem plausible. On the other hand, war places men under such tremendous stress that they sometimes do things they otherwise would not. Perhaps the story of booze, a bicycle, and a bridge is true.

Dad was not generally inclined to volunteer information about his past. Nor was he the sort of postwar military veteran who tries to acquire personal capital by reminding others of his service. However, I did once ask how his medical treatment came to be administered in the United States for an injury incurred in the United Kingdom. On this occasion his explanation was — by his own standard, at least — unusually lengthy. According to Dad, if the 8th AAF in England learned of his leg injury, he would have been hospitalized there. If this were the case, he would miss the opportunity to redeploy back to the States. In consequence, he tried to hide his condition. He even admitted to me that he and the 482nd Group’s flight surgeon reached an understanding to the effect that this leg injury would go unreported so that he not miss the opportunity to fly home.

He would later tell me that, once back in the States, he began flying training missions at an AAF base in Maryland. Meanwhile, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology near Boston, scientists in its Radiation Laboratory were hand-building a new American version of the British air-to-ground radar technology. The American version of this radar was to be called H2X. Soon, American bombers equipped with H2X were available for flight-testing at Grenier Field AAF base, located just outside Manchester in New Hampshire. No doubt the Air Force selected this particular facility to flight test the new technology both because Manchester is only about sixty miles north of Boston and because Grenier Field and was already being used for other training purposes. According to Bill Yenne in his Big Week; Six Days That Changed the Course of WWII “by the third week in September . . . the Rad[iation] Lab had installed a dozen H2X sets in a dozen Flying Fortresses [bombers]² . . . .” It was about this time that Dad himself was transferred from the Maryland base to Grenier Field.

At some point after his own arrival at Grenier, Dad’s leg injury became so painful that he could neither walk without a cane nor climb abroad the airplane without assistance. Only then did the Air Force become aware of his injury. Once it did, he was duly admitted to Grenier’s medical facility. His ankle injury was now diagnosed as a bimalleolar fracture. To repair such an injury, surgery is always required. During this procedure surgical screws are inserted to pin the anklebones back together. Dad himself described what the doctors inserted in his ankle as a bolt. Whatever is used to hold the ankle in place, it is removed after eight to twelve weeks. Even then, additional physical therapy will probably be needed for full recovery.