One of the universal truths when it comes to web-building, is that mistakes happen... more often than I care to admit. There are the all-too-frequent tpyos, er, typos and then there are the painful discoveries of more important things that somehow completely missed the mark. I just found something on our mission pages that, frankly, has me quite baffled.

Politz was the site of German oil refineries that were on the Allied hit list. The 492nd Bomb Group attacked it twice: first on 29 May 44 (Mission 12) and again on 20 June 44 (Mission 34). That second one was the deadliest day of them all for the 492nd, with 76 KIA, 22 POW and 41 interned in Sweden. But today being the anniversary of the first one, it seemed a good occasion to reflect on it and the importance of running the Nazis out of gas. So I visited the Mission 12 page. And there it was. My five year old error.

The map I had made five years ago for Mission 12 had Politz placed in northern Germany. I was certainly familiar with its location just across the German border in Poland because of the map I did for Mission 34, which was unique in that the formation flew past Politz to the north and swung around to attack it from the east. I may never know how I could have screwed that up, but I did. Now all I had to do was correct it. Unfortunately, that wouldn't be so easily done.

My Photoshop skills have grown over the years. Back then I didn't know enough about how to properly set up a Photoshop PSD file so I could easily edit it at a future date. My maps had no easy way for me to fix the one for Mission 12. I needed to start all over from scratch. Since I had been wanting to redesign them for some time anyway, this gave me the perfect excuse to give all the maps a colorful facelift. Eight hours later, here it is.

Now all I have to do is go through and convert all the other mission maps to my new-fangled, more colorful design. Today (Sunday) I've redone the maps for Mission 01 (Mulhouse) and Mission 02 (Zeitz), along with Mission 12 and Mission 34, compare them to all the others and let me know if you think they are as improved as I think they are. If I can crank out one a day, I'll have them all redone in, oh my... 63 days. Maybe I can accelerate that.

Update:
I put my nose to the grindstone and redid the maps for all 67 missions (only took me four long days). My new maps have a slightly new twist. Each mission map faintly shows the previous missions' targets. By the final mission you'll get an idea as to how widespread the missions of the 492nd were throughout Europe. Check them out and tell me what you think (unless you're not impressed, in which case kindly keep your opinion to yourself).

David Arnett 492ndBombGroup.com map enthusiast