Hey! So my grandpa and I are doing some local WW2 research. And you guys might help us :) My grandpa was 10 yo in 1944 when he was walking home to his small village Illingen - Saarland- Germany when he heard some bombers in the air. He said you could tell by the deeper noise that they carried bombs. He was right because they then dropped those bombs exactly where he was: on a field between three villages. He layed himself flat on the ground because he couldnt hide and he survived without any harm. No bomb exploded close enough to him.
Now 74 years later he is trying to find out what the mission of those bombers was? What was their target? Why did they droped them onto that field right in the middle of three villages? Not a single house was hit, no man/woman was hurt, nothing.
He could find a photo of the bombig with some text at the side and maybe you guys could help us now to find a database or archive where we could find some info on that?
We would be so happy to find this out! :)
Here is the photo: https://ibb.co/kx29Hn
The railroad marshaling yards at Saarbruch, 20 miles / 32km south of Illingen, were heavily bombed from 1943 through 1944 by the US Army 8th Air Force. If your grandfather knew what part of the year this occurred it might be possible to determine the mission / groups.
During the allied air campaign over Europe, on average a bomb could be expected to land within five miles of its intended target.
Ilingen is approximately 4 minutes from Saarbruch at 450 km/h.
Aircraft that missed their target, were in a low fuel state, or damaged often jettisoned their ordinance so they could return home.
This sub is academic and does not tolerate conjecture. You might post in the WWII History sub.
There's a [data visualisation project] (https://insight.livestories.com/s/v2/world-war-ii/3262351e-df74-437c-8624-0c3b623064b5/) that plots Allied bombing in Europe based on mission reports, though the source data isn't completely reliable. Zooming in on Illingen the closest bombing appears to be in the region of Holz, but looking it up in the source data reveals the target listed at Touquet on the French coast, so it's most likely a latitude/longitude error. The two targets most heavily hit in the area were Neunkirchen and Saarbrucken, both frequently bombed in 1944. As to why bombs landed in an empty field rather than on marshalling yards more than 10 kilometres away, if it was a foggy or cloudy day the bombers were likely "blind bombing" - using radar aids to bomb without being able to see their target. Lead aircraft in each squadron or group known as Pathfinder Force (PFF) aircraft carried H2X ground mapping radar to navigate to the target and when they dropped their bombs the rest of the formation followed suit. A USAAF study estimated that, with 10/10 cloud cover, more than 40% of bombs fell further than five miles from their intended target when bombing with H2X (Operations Analysis in the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force in World War II, Charles W. McArthur).
I'm afraid I'm not sure what the numbers on the photograph mean, but it looks like "44 (5/24)" in the middle, potentially a date; if that was a follow-up reconnaissance flight, the 303rd Bomb Group [bombed Saarbrucken the previous day] (http://www.303rdbg.com/missionreports/158.pdf):
"303rd BG (H) Combat Mission No. 158, 23 May 1944. (...) Twenty-six B-17s, including four spares, took off to bomb the Nancy/Essey airdrome in France. The secondary target, if the primary target could not be visually bombed, was the marshalling yards at Saarbrucken, Germany. (...) At the primary target, there were 8/10 clouds, prohibiting visual bombing. The secondary target at Saarbrucken was bombed by PFF. Twenty aircraft dropped 237 500-lb. G.P. M43 bombs from 25,000 and 24,000 feet. One aircraft jettisoned twelve 500-lb. bombs."
That's not necessarily the actual mission your grandpa witnessed, but the general circumstances of PFF bombing a nearby target fit; if you can pin down the actual day of the attack it might well be possible to track down the Bomb Groups involved and their target.