Dispatches from the Mighty Eighth

History & Heritage of the Mighty Eighth

Every week, William Lane Callaway — the Historian of the Eighth Air Force — writes the commanding general the “rest of the story” behind a date on the calendar, drawn from the records and the veterans he has known. We keep his words, set them the way they’d have looked typed on the headquarters letterhead, and open them to everyone: the styling is ours, the words are his. Two dates ride on every dispatch — the day Lane wrote it, and the day the history happened, often half a century apart.