Richard D. Butler, Pilot 44th Bomb Group 2nd Air Division 8th Air Force

Chances are you will not be coming home. Odds are against you. You gotta fly 300 miles an hour across the tops of trees straight into hell--flak, machine gun fire, exploding buildings, shooting flames, German Me-109s. You drop your bombs. You blow it all up. And then you gotta make it back.

“I just made up my mind I was going to survive for my wife and…baby,” said Lt. Dick Butler, a pilot of the B24 Liberator “Earthquake Magoon,” who had just found out his baby had been born a few days before.

The Ploesti Raid. One of the most daring raids in World War II. The target? Oil refineries, Ploesti, Romania. Cripple the German war machine. At the mission briefing Lt. Butler heard General Lewis Brereton say, “This mission is so important that if we lost every airplane but still destroyed the target, it would be worth it.” Colonel Leon Johnson, commander of the 44th Bomb Group, said nobody had to fly if they didn’t want to. Lt. Butler learned that no one backed out.

The Ploesti Raid was just one of the many harrowing missions that Lt. Dick Butler, with the 44th Bomb Group of the 2nd Air Division of the 8th Air Force recalled in a very emotional, very detailed interview by my father, Joseph Dzenowagis, a navigator with the 467th BG, and my mother, Helen Dzenowagis, a writer for the Lansing State Journal.

Lt. Butler who would rise to the rank of colonel, tells us about his experiences in three wars: flying combat in B24s in World War II, B29s in Korea and B52s in Vietnam. I must confess that I as I digitized Colonel Dick Butler’s interview it was too difficult for me to watch all of it.

At the end of the war in 1945 and in the years since the 2nd Air Division raised funds to create a "living memorial", what is now named the American Library 2nd Air Division Memorial, a place to not only remember those lost, but to also build upon the cultural and enduring ties between the peoples of America and the United Kingdom. The Library, in Norwich, England, has books, events, lectures and an extensive research archives, serving as an important resource for information about a family member who served, about the war and about American culture.

I want to mention that we encourage you to become involved, to find out more about how you can connect, research, volunteer or contribute to the American Library Memorial to the 2nd Air Division, a Library that honors the men and women lost on the Ploesti Raid and the hundreds of missions of the 2nd Air Division:

https://www.americanlibrary.uk