On May 1, the day the world learned of Adolf Hitler’s suicide, the Eighth became, in Crosby’s words, “another kind of air force”—not strategic or tactical but humanitarian, part of a mission the British called Operation Manna, the Americans, less reverentially, Operation Chowhound. By agreement with the Germans, only skeleton crews—crews without gunners—were authorized to fly, but that order was almost universally disregarded. “Everyone wanted to fly,” Crosby recalled. Even maintenance men and chaplains boarded the heavies after loading the bomb bays with boxes of Army rations and sacks of
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