FAQ - Mighty 8th Cross-Reference

Frequently Asked Questions

Who thought this site up? I am the guilty party - Fred Preller, a Connecticut Yankee formerly living Deep in the Heart of (Northeast) Texas - but now retired in Cold Springs (Reno), Nevada. My father flew B-17s in WWII with the 384th Bomb Group out of Grafton Underwood, during he summer of 1944. My work as an aerospace systems engineer afforded me opportunities to travel to the UK and visit significant WWII 8^th Air Force sites and meet some really wonderful people. This website is my small part of the recognition the members of the 8^th - and all service members - have earned and richly deserve.

Please explain the placement of the symbols on the site locator maps. Many people have helped me determine where the airfields and headquarters were located. I have placed the symbols as close as I can determine to (a.) the midpoint of the runway for single-runway airfields, (b.) the intersection of the runways for dual-runway airfields, and (c.) in the open space enclosed by the runways on three-runway airfields (the most common). For grass fields with no paved runway areas, I indicated the center of the area. Of course, my intention is to show the wartime configuration. Your comments and assistance are welcome.

What can I use the maps for? In addition to locating the airfield and nearby points of interest (memorials, museums), multimap.com offers driving directions and other travel information. As it is a fully clickable map, you can roam and zoom as needed to satisfy your interest. I print them, and bring them along for reference, when visiting the sites - they are useful for making notes and recording what I have seen, and where I saw it.
Maps may be accessed from the obvious links. But many photos on this site contain a clickable link to a map that indicates the precise location of the scene pictured - just place your cursor on the photo, and if a hand appears click to get your map. If you hover your cursor on such a picture, you will also get a popup advisory about the existence of a map link, and a reminder that the map window may remain hidden behind your currently active window.

What if I click and the map doesn't appear? This is simple for you to overcome - just look in your taskbar for the window that says "Map of United Kingdom" and select it - there's your map! Technically, there are a number of solutions, but they are not all available to me. Until I get it resolved, you will have to manually select the map window ... sorry!

Can I view aerial photographs of the map areas? YES! Probably the niftiest feature of the maps on this site is the availability of aerial photography!
As mentioned above, this site provides links to maps (provided FREE by MultiMap) of just about everything mentioned or presented on this site. Click on a link that says "Map location of the whatever area" or "whatever Locater Map" to find out where an airfield is, or click on most photographs to see the map location where they were taken!
MultiMap has a top-notch service, and I am pleased to use it to deliver maps to site visitors.
Please try out the aerial photo feature. Look in the upper left corner of the map - you will see a button there labeled "Aerial". Click it to view the aerial photographic representation of the map area.

Who are the people listed as contacts for sites and units? They are people who share an interest in things related to the Eighth Air Force - facilities, exploits, accomplishments, and most of all, the personnel. I have provided what contacts I have obtained permission to use. You are encouraged to contact them with questions about the various groups and facilities. Please keep in mind that these individuals are willing to provide a reasonable level of assistance in their free time, and they have other demands on their time.

Who thought up these colors? The color theme for this website is intended to evoke a sense of the military in WWII. The background color is an approximation of faded olive-drab, while the tables are supposed to look like "khaki." Development is done on an LCD screen, but is no longer checked on a regular CRT. All pages are previewed in both Netscape and Internet Explorer to ensure that browser differences do not reduce the usefulness of the presentation. If viewing this site is difficult on your system, please let me know the details of the problem as well as the pertinent parts of your system configuration.

What's with all of these windows? All bomb group pages, for instance, are sent to a window named "Groups" - divisions, wings, and airfields are handled similarly. This was done to provide the following benefits. First, you can return to the page you just came from with one click on the TASK BAR, with no waiting for the page to load. Second - and this is a big benefit when you are really exploring the site - the "Back" and "Forward" buttons in each window can move you thru the list of pages you have displayed in that window. This means that you can review several Bomb Groups that you have been looking at without disturbing the states of the other windows. As with anything, however, there is a trade-off: having more windows open on the screen makes it harder to keep track of what is going on. My feeling is that this is a reasonable tradeoff.

Who is looking at these pages? I really cannot tell, even though I get rather detailed statistics - user identities are not available. However, the site is getting close to 1,000 "page requests" every day, from users with Wintel computers running all flavors of Windows. Very few other types of computers visit the site. About twice as many visitors use Internet Explorer as use Netscape. There are also a few WebTV and Windows CE visitors. All, of course, are welcome, and if you experience problems, please let me know what system you are using.

What does the visitor counter count? It counts how many times the Welcome page is loaded. It doesn't count successive page loads by the same "user" (IP address), thereby keeping the count a bit more honest than it would otherwise be. However, it does not track visits by individual users, so if you visit the site every day, each visit will increase the visit count. So, when I brag that there have been over 67,000 visits to the site, that does not mean there have been over 67,000 different visitors to the site - just that number of Welcome page loads.