This map completes the set of depictions of the three years of combat mission data for the 501st Bomb Squadron, 345th Bomb Group during WW2. Missions during 1945 were flown in the Philippines, Indochina, China, Formosa, Japan and Korea. As with the previous maps, zooming in on a dot will reveal all the airplanes involved in that mission and clicking on one will bring up a popup containing information about that airplane and that mission.
During 1945, the 501st Bomb Squadron completed 107 combat missions to 81 distinct target locations. On the 100 days that missions were flown, more than 558 sorties, or attacks by individual airplanes, were completed. These numbers disguise the incomplete nature of the archival materials available and it is likely that more missions were flown than are accounted for.
Some of the apparent gaps in the records were undoubtedly created when the 345th changed base locations, which seems to have occurred at least four times during 1945. While the airplanes could be flown to a new location, the ground crews, their equipment, and facilities equipment were often shipped by ocean-going vessels which would take much longer. There were more than a few references to gasoline shortages toward the end of the war that caused the cancellation of missions.
The data for 1945 was less rich than that of 1944 in that no load lists were available to me, fewer mission maps were included in the narrative mission reports, and the narrative reports were themselves less descriptive of individual performance. I was fortunate to have access to several sets of war-era topographic maps for the entire area of operations so that, along with careful reading of the narrative reports, and some structured imagination, I could make informed estimates of where individual airplanes dropped their bombs. In several instances, well drawn mission maps were available in the narrative reports that made excellent overlays on the satellite imagery. These instances provide the most accurate bomb placements of the entire data set.
Along with the Army Map Service 1:50,000 topographic maps, 1:10,000 City Plan maps were available for larger towns on Luzon and Formosa. Close examination of the streets and railroad tracks on those maps made it possible to find exact locations on satellite imagery. Between both map styles, it was often possible to locate exactly where various industrial targets had been located. For coastal Indochina and coastal China, a variety of Army Map Service 1:250,000 topographic maps and old city maps made finding targets more accurate than would have been possible without them.
As a way to bring all of the squadron mission data together, below is a map that displays all three years of the individual airplane targets. The different years are indicated by the dot color. Dot placements might vary from previous maps not only because of the methodology of estimating individual airplane targets, but also because the use of war-era maps to help identify more exact target locations.
This post was updated on May 14, 2020 to correct the data shown in popups.