An Interactive History of T/SGT Bremer’s missions with the 348th Bombardment Squadron (Heavy), 99th Bombardment Group in World War 2

Background

In June 2020, I attended an auction in Auburn, IN for the express purpose of seeing General George Patton’s command car. As luck would have it, I purchased a box of World War 2 memorabilia. During the un-boxing, I stumbled into the mission records of T/SGT John Bremer, a radio operator on a B17 in the above mentioned squadron.

A video of my going through the box of memorabilia is here: https://youtu.be/xf3vNJH4uiw

Furthermore, if you want to see Patton’s command car on the auction block, then go here: https://youtu.be/zdvf7-46yI4

The concept here is to link and enrich the information in the memorandum, which enumerates the missions, with publicly available data. The memorandum has mission date, target location, mission hours, and in some cases target type. I enriched the data with a deeper definition of target type, latitude, and longitude. This data is available at the website data.world and is named Theater History of Operations (THOR).

https://data.world/datamil/world-war-ii-thor-data

The Interactive Part

My primary intent is to combine these datasets and provide an interactive map to explore the missions this brave airman participated. It also serves as a platform to expand such analyses to all services, in all theaters, in all wars this country has fought. I welcome your comments, questions, errors and omissions!

B17, El Diablo:

Caveats

Like all data, the memo and the THOR data is fraught with missing information and some potential errors. For example, the memo is incomplete. Below is a picture of page 2, which has 15 mission numbers, but only 14 actual targets. I had to scrub the memo data with the THOR data to come up with the logical results. I was unable to reconcile two missions and I categorized them as ‘Unknown’.

Furthermore, the THOR data has some entry errors. In this specific case, it was assigning missions to the 12th Air Force before it was even established. As always, I welcome your insights and corrections.

Interactive Map

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