They were very strict about talking on the radio from the time you took off until you were over Germany and even then it was used only for necessary messages and warning each other when in combat. Any unnecessary talk might have given away information to the Germans (even though they had probably picked us up on their radar). The English bombers always bombed the enemy at night and they continued to do this throughout the War. They thought that the Americans were crazy to bomb in broad daylight. The B-17 bombers, however, were heavily armed and could defend themselves fairly well. The English bombers, on the other hand, had few guns. When the B-17s first began flying, the Germans had so many fighter planes that the losses were terrible. With ten men in each bomber, sometimes five or six hundred men would be lost in a single mission. The situation reversed itself when the fighter planes had range enough to escort the bombers all the way to the target. At the time I was flying, the American fighters were beginning to outnumber the enemy. Their losses were so heavy that on some of, our missions we did not see a single enemy plane. One time, before we started flying missions we had the opportunity to visit an English radar station in southern England. It was a large curved glass about six feet across at table top level with a map of England and Europe on the glass. The room in which it was placed was dark and there was a light under the glass. The planes returning from a mission were little blips on the glass. A couple of the blips were over the ocean way south of England and they were trying to contact them by radio to reorient them. they were far off course and expected to run out of fuel over the Atlantic. I imagine there were more than a few who ended up missing England due to wind changes or bad weather during the war. When we did use our radio we had a code for each mission and the four flights of each squadron were: red, blue, green, etc. We used these codes when talking to each other so we knew who we were talking to without using any given names. We looked forward to short missions to France or Belgium and these were called "milk runs". The long missions with flak and enemy fighters were the ones we dreaded. I should mention that we had a certain amount of fear on these missions. It has been said that anyone who doesn't experience fear in combat is lying. It affected some more than others, however, and we were constantly being observed by our doctor for any signs of battle fatigue. The strain would begin to tell after you had flown a lot of missions.