The 408th Bomb Squadron, 22nd Bomb Group embarked from San Francisco for overseas service during the first week of February 1942. They arrived in Honolulu on February 15 and operated as the Base Squadron at Archer Field for six weeks. In April, they left Hawaii and headed for Queensland, Australia. Left behind in Honolulu was a small contingent of combat crews.
The 408th Squadron flew their first combat mission on April 21, 1942 and during their first six months in combat they targeted enemy strongholds on New Guinea, New Britain, and Timor, as well as convoys in the Solomon Sea. The combat crews stationed on Hawaii participated in the Battle of Midway on from May 29 to June 4, 1943.
Stationed in the Townsville area, the 22nd Bomb Group would fly their B-26 Marauders to Port Moresby, New Guinea and stage missions from there. As the war progressed and more airfields became available, the 22nd moved to new base areas – at least ten times during their three years overseas.
AFHRA microfilm reel A0608 contains the unit history of the 408th Bomb Squadron of the 22nd Bomb Group. Their mission targets were well documented and after extracting that data, it was used to produce the map displayed above. The unit history documents 421 missions. Four of the missions were omitted from the map because no target was listed in the mission report and two others were omitted because the location could not be found. Because this map was created to show general, targeted areas, multiple missions to the same location are displayed by a single map dot, but the lines connecting base areas to targets get more opaque with multiple missions. It is possible that the unit history was not complete as there was a period from January until October 1943 that had no recorded activity.
Because of the wide area covered by the 408th during the war, the scale of the map is small, and is somewhat disappointing, due to the lack of detail. In an effort to alleviate the disappointment, I created a series of maps of targets from each base area. Doing so made it possible to label the targets and allows a better understanding of places the 408th operated over.
[I noticed that this post was very slow to load up, so I decided to move the base area maps to a separate post. They can be viewed in the post titled “408th Squadron, 22nd Bomb Group Mission Targets by Airfield”.]
While overseas, the 408th first flew the Martin B-26 Marauder medium bomber and used them to bomb from altitudes of several thousand feet.
By October 1943, the 408th Squadron was flying their missions in the North American B-25 medium bomber. Bombing continued to be conducted from medium altitudes and they never seem to have adopted the strafer and minimum altitude bombing strategies.
In April 1944, the 408th had changed airplanes again, this time to the Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. This bomber carried a much heavier bomb load and also had a greater fuel capacity, which increased their operational range. They flew the B-24 through the end of the war.
