Night Leaflet Squadron

Squadron

The 422nd Bomb Squadron of the 305th Bomb Group became the Night Leaflet Squadron in September 1943. Their nickname was the "Newsboys of the Eighth". The Squadron began by dropping bundles of leaflets by hand out of the aircraft. Then a system was devised for boxes of leaflets to be released from the bomb bays. Eventually, to increase the accuracy of each leaflet drop, one of the Squadron's armament officers devised a leaflet bomb that was fused to burst at 1000-2000 feet. Each of these bombs held 80,000 leaflets and each aircraft could carry twelve of them. The Squadron dropped 1,493,760,000 leaflets over Europe during its 319 nights operations.

Revisions

Date
ContributorAAM
Changes
Sources

The Mighty Eighth. A History of the Units, Men and Machines of the US 8th Air Force.' by Roger A. Freeman (1989). 'Air Force Combat Units of World War II' compiled by the Department of the US Air Force, edited by Maurice Maurer (1983).