398th Volunteers Needed
In order to speed along our work on the 398th Web Site, we are in need of volunteers to perform a number of duties. If you feel that you would like to volunteer for any of the following activities below, please contact our 398th Volunteer Coordinator who will work with you to get started.
Volunteer activities require access to e-mail and most projects can be done at home. The most important skills are attention to detail and being organized.
The content of the 398th Web Pages is very much the result of a small group of volunteers. Generally records are scattered about and most records need transcribing to allow easy reading on our web pages. The above volunteers' link both acknowledges our dedicated group of volunteers but also provides examples of the kinds of work they have done.
Current Needs for Volunteers
- Timeless Voices Transcriptions
The 398th BGMA has been interview its members and some of those interviews are now available on our 398th Timeless Voices Interviews page. Volunteers have transcribed a number of these interviews to text for our web page. 398th Timeless Voices Interviews Transcription Status provides a table indicating the status of transcriptions for the above interviews. There are many to do and each can take some time to complete. At the current rate it may take well into 2009 before completion of all of this first round. - Diary Transcriptions (three available at this time)
As 398th combat diaries are found, we are adding them to our web pages. However, they first need to be transcribed into digital text. We generally ask the veteran's family to do this if they can. In some cases, it is not possible for the family to do so and in these cases, we desire a volunteer to do the transcriptions. Duties would include transcribing the text into your computer's Word Processor which when complete would be sent to us via e-mail for inclusion on our 398th Web Page. The handwritten diary would be sent to you either as a pdf file or via postal mail.
In additiona, if you have a diary that we don't know about, we'd like to both hear from you and also ask you if you would type it into electronic text for us. - Official 398th Reports
There are a number of official 398th Mission Reports that would be useful to have on-line. These include: Operations Officers Reports, Group Bombardier Reports, Flight Logs, Formation Charts, and Interrogation Reports. For current status see: - 398th Missing Aircraft Reports Transcriptions
There are sixty-six known 398th Bomb Group Missing Air Crew Reports (MACR's). These MACR's contain all of the information known at the time of loss as to why these B-17's and their crews were missing in combat. Each MACR is a number of report pages. It would be useful to transcribe these MACR's for our web pages. Duties would include transcribing the text into your computer's Word Processor which when complete would be sent to us via e-mail for inclusion on our 398th Web Page. We would provide the pages to be transcribed via e-mail. You may find this of interest if your favorite veteran was associated with a particular MACR. - 398th Mission Names and Locations
The 398th flew 195 Combat Missions to locations in France, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. A table was started some years ago to identify historical and current spellings and locations of these targets. To date 21 of 195 have been completed. For someone with a special interest in geography and placenames in Europe, this would be a nice project. See our 398th Mission Names and Locations page for further information. - National Archives Search in Maryland
There are a number of 398th photos at the US National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland which we do not have. It would be useful if a 398th member who lives nearby, has a laptop, and a portable scanner could make some scans for us.
If you feel that you would like to volunteer for any of the above activities, please contact the 398th Volunteer Coordinator who will work with you to get started.