History
Activated in mid-1942 as a B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber squadron; initially assigned to Second Air Force for training, however also flew antisubmarine patrols over the Pacific Northwest coastline during the fall of 1942 and over the Northeast coastline from Newfoundland and Long Island, New York during 1943, being detached to Army Air Forces Antisubmarine Command. Returned to training status in October 1943 when antisubmarine duty was taken over by the United States Navy.
Re-equipped with B-24 Liberators by Second Air Force in late 1943, training until being deployed to the European Theater of Operations (ETO); being assigned to VIII Bomber Command in England. Squadron entered combat on 30 May 1944, in the period immediately before the D-Day landings. Took part in strategic bombing campaign over Europe. Also supported the D-Day landings and the massive aerial attack that preceded the breakthrough at St. Lo. The unit was also used to carry food to liberated France and to the rapidly advancing Allied troops during August and September 1944 and to carry supplies to the Allied troops in Holland during Operation Market Garden.
In November-December 1944 the squadron was withdrawn to the United States, where it began to prepare to deploy to the Pacific. The unit was inactivated on 28 March 1945 when the 489th was redesignated a very heavy bombardment group, which was authorized only three instead of the previous four flying squadrons.
Read more about this topic: 847th Bombardment Squadron
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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)