“From our base in Texas we practiced the tactics that we would be using when we got to the Pacific Theater of Operations. Each training flight was from six to eight hours long. We would fly to California and back, practicing long-range navigation and drop dummy bombs on a bombing range in New Mexico. We would fly along the Guadalupe Mountains in western Texas shooting at gunnery targets. Flying formation, we would have the gunners firing at attacking fighter planes, using gun cameras rather than live ammunition. We took pictures of everything we did so we could review the results in debriefings after the flight”.