The mission of this website is to preserve the history of the 34th Bomb Group; it's air crews, ground crews, aircraft, and missions flown in support of the US 8th Army Air Force in destroying vital military and industrial sites in the enemy's homeland and occupied territories via high-altitude precision daylight bombing. This site draws heavily from the website "Valor to Victory" (V2V), the official web presence of the 34th Bomb Group Association which was dissolved in December 2008. We owe special thanks to Gary Farrell (now deceased), the Archivist and Historian of the 34th BGA. Our aim is to not only preserve the effort expended to produce the original V2V website but to extend it's capability through the use of formal database structures that underpin all of the new site's contents. Our aspirations are to a great extent motivated by the many excellent sites produced by fellow 8th AAF Bomb Groups such as the 100th, 303rd and 384th.

Development of this site is primarily in the hands of two brothers who had looked to the V2V site to locate information about their late father's participation as a B-17 navigator for the 34th. Impetus to build this site came in large part from our early frustration with that site. If quite literally took a span of 8 months from the time we first encountered the V2V site until we found the one and only reference to our father (his surname only!) on one of the pages of "Combat crew records" which are organized by Pilot's last name. We had no idea who the pilot of our dad's crew had been, so looking through all the crew records pilot by pilot seemed like a time-consuming task. Finally, we prepared a spreadsheet for all the missions that our father had flown (we happened to have his original flight records) and all the pilots who flew sorties on those missions. The two pilots who flew the most sorties on that set of missions were then our top candidates. Pilot Robert Hemingway, proved to be the one we were looking for. Once we had the connection from crew member (our father) to crew (the Hemingway Crew), we finally started to get traction on our greater understanding of the sacrifices endured and shared perils encountered by the heavy bomber crews.

While this site is far from completed, we hope you will find it useful and informative in its current form. Currently (2026-04-09) there are 3185 individuals listed in the Personnel Roster. When our first phase of site construction is completed (hopefully by year end 2026), we expect that number will have grown to be somewhere between 4000 and 5000. At present, a great deal of core functionality is working. Once you have located an individual of interest in the Roster, look for a "link" symbol in the rightmost column labeled "Combat Sorties". If that link is present, there is information currently available regarding combat missions (and occasionally some non-combat missions) flown by the target individual. Clicking on the link brings up that list. In the list of sorties flown, there are links (again to the far right) that will produce a more detailed "Sortie Report". The sortie reports list the crew members who (to the best of our knowledge) were also present on a particular aircraft on that mission.

We are pleased that you have found this site. If by chance you are researching an individual who you know to be a air crew member but there is no sortie information yet indicated, feel free to contact me and I will make a point to prioritize making those particular sorties available post-haste. At 70+ years old, I'm not as nimble on the keyboard as I once was, but I want to complete data entry for all the information in the original V2V site as soon as I can make it happen. I anticipate that it will be a 6-12 month effort if I don't devise some method to speed the process along. My email is: jlsager@csuchico.edu

Finally, I would like to make a shout out to John Funk, son of M/Sgt Lewis Funk, Photo Chief for the 34th Bomb Group. John provides the online collection of " Mendlesham Memories", the newsletter of the 34th Bomb (H) Group Association, Inc. He is also custodian of Lew Funks WWII photo collection - a healthy portion of which we hope to provide access to via various web pages and links provided on this site.