<text id=00he0911><title>Nickels and Carpetbaggers</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Nickels and Carpetbaggers</hdr><body>
<p>The special abilities of aircraft were used in a number of non-combat, although risky, missions. One was 'nickeling', dropping leaflets over occupied areas. Hundreds of millions of these propaganda sheets were cast into Europe, at first in loose bundles tossed out a hatch or gunner's window. Technology took over, and a leaflet bomb was devised, dropped in the usual manner. A small explosive charge broke open the package after it was well clear of the aircraft.
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<p>Underground operations, particularly by the French Free Forces of the Interior (FFI, or Maquis), contributed much to the success of Allied arms. But they needed supplies: weapons, explosives, ammunition and medicine. Third Air Division took on the task, and organized several mass drops with as many as 324 B-17s unloading their bomb bays on seven drop zones.
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<p>Other supplies were delivered by 'Carpetbagger' squadrons, four B-24 outfits that flew modified aircraft on many trips to the continent, delivering agents and ammo, guerrillas and guns, medicine and leaflets. The shiny black Liberators, their belly ball turrets replaced by an open hatch called the 'Joe-hole'—from which agents, known in orders only as 'Joe' or 'Jane' parachuted—had begun their clandestine flights early in 1944, well ahead of the invasion. By mid-September, with France and Belgium liberated, they turned to Norway on additional missions.
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<p>Other B-24s, augmented by C-47s from Troop Carrier Commands, operated in the Balkans and northern Italy, aiding partisan units. C-47s once rescued Yugoslavian leader Tito and his staff just ahead of a German assault that surely would have captured them and changed history.
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<p>These missions, whether dropping leaflets or agents, were risky. No crew could be certain that the signal lights below were genuine, or that the radio message was coming from a guerrilla band and not from its German captors. Night flying, even in the later stages of the war, was an uncertain art. Radio location was only relatively accurate. And every underground unit, with reason, was both suspicious and trigger-happy.
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<p>The results were intangible. 'Nickeling' or inserting an agent never produced the satisfaction that seeing a good bomb pattern on target could. Yet, in their way, those missions helped speed the victory.
