1944 Bombing of Miles City, Montana

[AndyJWest]

An interesting little tale...

 

 

[HansBlitz]

Boise City, Oklahoma was also bombed by a B17.

 

"In 1943 a B-17 bomber dropped six practice bombs on Boise City. These one-hundred-pound dummy bombs did not injure anybody but did damage a garage, sidewalk, and church. The plane flew from Dalhart Army Air Base, fifty miles south of Boise City, and mistook the town square's lights for its target. The town claims to be one of the few continental U.S. communities bombed during World War II."

 

paragraph above is from : https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=BO005

[CUJO_1970]

There was insufficient airspace in England to really practice...inevitable for things like this to happen stateside as they tried to conduct all their training in the US prior to shipping to Europe.

[Skycat1969]

There were four B-17 training fields in Montana that operated from November 1942 until October 1943. Each hosted a squadron as entire bombardment groups rotated through Montana for final training before going overseas. Practice included formation work and targeting bomb ranges. The training cadre was 2nd Air Force.

 

Several years ago I read a diary by a pilot who trained at the aerodrome near Glasgow, Montana. He described an incident where bombs were used to break up an ice jam on a river. My memory is fuzzy on the details but I assume it was the Milk River near Glasgow. I recall that his squadron also marched in the Glasgow Fourth of July Parade; so assuming a 2-3 month training period for each of the four squadrons that were trained at Glasgow this bombing may have occurred in late Spring 1943. (The winter had been the coldest on record at that time.) I haven't found any corroborating articles about this though.