But everything had gone wrong this otherwise bright and sunny day in mid June 1944. The small flight of eighteen bombers was supposed to meet up with the escorting fighters, but the P51’s never showed. Some snafu? Very likely, the angry bomber crews thought, but what the hell else was new. The flight’s commander, an ambitious major who wanted to make colonel before the war ended, determined to soldier on. The fighters would either meet him or they would not. It didn’t matter-he had a target to bomb and a promotion to earn. And, since the D-Day invasion at Normandy had been successful, it was thought that collapse of Nazi Germany was imminent, certainly by the end of 1944. Ergo, the major didn’t have time to waste. His career was at stake.

Their target was not a high priority one. It was a factory complex near the city of Landsberg, which was north and east of Berlin. There were fewer and fewer German interceptors in the air and the major felt that this small group of bombers was unlikely to attract attention. Even though their attack would take them well into the Third Reich, it was considered little more than a training run.

Several of the eighteen bomber crews were on their first combat flight, and that included the men of the Mother’s Milk. The name had been chosen while several of the crew had been drunk on English beer, and they compounded their mistake by hiring an artist of dubious talent who painted a farm girl on the fuselage. She wore a halter top, extremely short shorts that showed much of her cheeks, and a toothy smile. And she had grotesquely enormous boobs that other crews considered laughable, which pissed off the Milk ’s rookie crew who were further teased by being called “Milkmen.” They accepted the nickname and used it among themselves.

Twenty-four-year-old First Lieutenant Paul Phips was her commander and he was scared to death as well as freezing his ass off. He was not a warrior. Small of stature and slight of build, he reminded people of a Midwestern grocery clerk, not a bomber pilot. The truth was not that far off. He’d been in his first year as a high school teacher in Iowa when the draft grabbed him, and he still had no idea how he’d passed flight school.