90th Bomb Group 'Jolly Rogers' and the 400th 'Black Pirates' Squadron — unit context for Robert Earl Wildermuth's WWII service

The WWII combat log “The Big One” and Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir tell his Pacific war in his own voice. This page gathers the unit-history context from the published record so the personal narrative can be read against the operational record of the group he flew with: the 400th Bomb Squadron “Black Pirates” of the 90th Bombardment Group “Jolly Rogers,” Fifth Air Force, Southwest Pacific Area.

The primary online source is the 90th Bomb Group historical site at 90thbombgroup.org — a comprehensive archive of flight crew photographs, B-24 aircraft records, nose art, mission stories, and documents maintained by veterans and family descendants of the group. The companion deep-detail resources are Pacific Wrecks (aircraft and personnel records), OzAtWar (Australia-and-Southwest-Pacific operational detail), and the History of War 90th Bomb Group article. James Lefemine’s published volume Unit History of the 400th Bombardment Squadron Jolly Rogers: The Black Pirates of the 90th Heavy Bombardment Group WWII is the squadron-specific history.

The unit lineage

The 90th Bombardment Group (Heavy) was activated 15 April 1942 at Key Field, Mississippi. It comprised four bomb squadrons: the 319th, 320th (“Moby Dick”), 321st (“Bombs Away”), and 400th (“Black Pirates”). The group’s nickname — “Jolly Rogers” — came from the skull-and-crossbones nose-and-tail art it adopted in 1943 under group commander Col. Arthur Rogers; the group motto “THE BEST DAMN HEAVY BOMB GROUP IN THE WORLD” is still carried on the group’s veterans’ association site today.

The 90th flew the B-24 Liberator — the four-engine American heavy bomber Consolidated Aircraft built in greater numbers than any other US wartime aircraft (18,482 produced). The B-24 carried a crew of ten: pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, radio operator, top-turret engineer, ball-turret gunner, two waist gunners, and tail gunner. Robert Earl Wildermuth was the navigator on a 400th Squadron B-24 crew.

The group’s assignment was to Fifth Air Force, V Bomber Command under Lt. Gen. George C. Kenney — Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s air commander in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA). The SWPA theater stretched from Australia north through New Guinea, the Solomons, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and finally to Okinawa.

The geography of the group’s war — Australia to Okinawa

The 90th’s combat deployment ran from November 1942 through August 1945, moving north as MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign advanced toward Japan:

November 1942 — Hawaii. The group arrived at Hickam Field, Oahu, with B-24Ds.
December 1942 — Australia. Moved to the “Iron Range” of north Queensland (Mareeba airbase), from where it launched the first long-range strategic missions against Japanese positions in New Britain, New Guinea, and the Solomons.
March 1943 — New Guinea. Forward-deployed to Port Moresby (Jackson Field), then Dobodura, then Nadzab as the front line moved north. Targets: Wewak, Rabaul, Lae, Gasmata — the Japanese naval and air bases that controlled access to the South Pacific.
January 1944 — Wakde Island (off the north New Guinea coast).
September 1944 — Biak. Robert Earl’s memoir places him at Biak — an island airfield in Geelvink Bay, northwest New Guinea, from which the group launched some of the longest unescorted bombing missions of the war. The Balikpapan oil refinery raids of September-October 1944 — deep-strike missions to Japanese-held Borneo, 1,700-mile round trips of 17+ hours over open ocean — were the group’s most demanding operational period.
November 1944 — Leyte, Philippines. Robert Earl’s memoir places him at Leyte. After the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 1944), the 90th moved forward to Leyte’s Tacloban airfield to support the Philippines campaign. Targets: Luzon, Taiwan, and the Japanese sea-supply lines.
December 1944 — Mindoro, Philippines. Robert Earl’s memoir places him at Mindoro. The forward base for striking Manila and the Luzon Japanese positions during the January-March 1945 Philippines liberation.
August 1945 — Okinawa. The final forward base from which the group could reach the Japanese home islands directly — and the staging point for the postwar reconnaissance and occupation flights.

The three Pacific bases Robert Earl’s record names — Biak, Leyte, Mindoro — together cover the period September 1944 through April 1945, the seven months of his most intense combat flying.

Mission types and the Air Medal record

The group’s standard missions during Robert Earl’s tour were:

Long-range strategic bombing of Japanese installations: airfields, naval bases, oil refineries, troop concentrations
Anti-shipping strikes against Japanese supply convoys in the SWPA
Tactical close air support for MacArthur’s ground forces during the Philippines liberation
Mining missions — aerial mining of Japanese harbors

The Air Medal was awarded for completion of every five combat missions; oak leaf clusters denoted additional awards (so four awards = the basic Medal + three clusters = twenty combat missions). Robert Earl’s decoration record — Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters — therefore indicates at least twenty completed combat missions as B-24 navigator. The Southwest Pacific Area Medal with two battle stars records his participation in two of the named SWPA campaigns; the Philippine Liberation Medal with two battle stars records his role in the 1944-45 Philippines campaigns.

Late 1945 — the MGM camera-plane mission

After the 6 August 1945 Hiroshima and 9 August 1945 Nagasaki atomic bombings and the 15 August 1945 Japanese surrender announcement, the 90th Bomb Group was repositioned for post-surrender reconnaissance, ferry missions, and the photography of the bombed Japanese cities for documentary record.

Family memory and the combat log “The Big One” record that Robert Earl was the navigator on the B-24 that flew MGM Studios cameras over Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the cinematographic record of the first atomic strikes that the postwar world would form its understanding of nuclear weapons from. The mission is one of the documentary closures of his Pacific tour: a war-trained navigator with twenty-plus completed missions, asked to fly a camera plane over the cities the war ended with.

The group was deactivated 27 January 1946 and Robert Earl mustered out of the Army Air Forces with a Stanford acceptance and the GI Bill ahead of him.

What Robert Earl shared the war with

The 90th Bomb Group flew approximately 316 B-24 Liberators during its combat tour. The group lost about 115 aircraft and 800 personnel killed or missing in action across the war. One in seven of the group’s flight crew did not return. Robert Earl’s twenty-plus missions placed him within the statistical bulk of survivors — but his crew of ten was the same kind of crew that, on other missions and other days, did not return.

The photograph of Robert Earl’s crew at a Pacific tent camp is part of the visual record. The crew photographs at 90thbombgroup.org carry similar frames of other crews from the same period. Many of the men in those frames did not come home.

How to read the unit history alongside the personal record

The 90th Bomb Group historical site at 90thbombgroup.org organizes its archive by:

Flight Crew Photos — named crews, often with mission tallies
Unidentified Crew Photos — crews the site is still trying to identify
B-24 Full Plane Photos — individual aircraft records by serial number
Silver Star Bombers — the most famous individual B-24s of the group
Nose Art — the painted-on identifier for each plane
Strike Photos — aerial bomb damage assessment photographs
90th Bomb Group Stories — personal recollections from group veterans
Documents — letters, Christmas cards, and unit papers

A reader working through Robert Earl’s combat log and memoir can cross-reference specific missions, aircraft, and dates against the 90thbombgroup.org archive. The site’s Message Board is the active forum where surviving families and researchers post identification requests — the equivalent of the Charlie Company veterans’ reunion mechanism for the Vietnam-era Charlie 1-506th chronicle.

The published unit history — Alcorn’s Jolly Rogers

The foundational published history of the group is John S. Alcorn’s The Jolly Rogers: History of the 90th Bomb Group During World War II (Historical Aviation Album, Temple City, CA, 1981; ISBN 0-911852-89-1) — a 212-page, heavily illustrated volume that traces the group from its April 1942 activation through its role as the first unit to take the B-24 Liberator into action in the Southwest Pacific in November 1942 and on through the end of the war. Alcorn later expanded the work into a larger multi-volume edition. Much of the online 90thbombgroup.org archive and the later squadron histories build on the record Alcorn first assembled.

For this family archive, Alcorn’s book is the natural print reference for two things Robert Earl’s own papers only gesture at: the aircraft-by-aircraft and nose-art record of the group — the level at which the planes named in his WWII scrapbook captions (Gladys, Belle Wringer, and the ill-fated Cherokee Strip, which his caption says “blew up in flight killing all aboard”) would be documented and dated — and the group-level operational narrative that runs underneath his squadron’s dated missions. Confirming Cherokee Strip’s loss against Alcorn’s aircraft tables (or the group’s Missing Air Crew Reports) is an open research thread; this archive has not yet verified it against the book itself.