In a letter from John to his family:

 

“Came down in a big GI bus from Lincoln. The B-29 men at Lincoln were divided into 5 groups. Two went back to New Mexico, one to Kansas, and the remaining two groups to Fairmont and Harvard - both in Nebraska. Harvard is a small, isolated town. It’s a small post, but it has a different purpose than the large training command fields where they have thousands of personnel and hundreds of ships.

 

We will be trained as units - entire crews and squadrons are kept together. There are 15-20 B-29’s on the field. We are scheduled to stay here for 4 months and it may take longer for the organization to change over to B-29’s.

 

The training program calls for 75 hours B-17, 80 hours B-29 and 40 hours in (preferably) B-29’s or B-17’s.

 

Here we’ll be flying missions. We’ll bomb a factory in Tulsa (with cameras) - we’ll be intercepted by actual fighters and shoot them down (with cameras) - we’ll fly into weather, drop real bombs on dummy targets, shoot live ammunition at ground and air-towed targets - fly in formation at altitude - at night and day. It’ll be tough training.”