Mission Statement
Our Mission
This website is dedicated to the men who flew with the 445th Bomb Group out of Tibenham, England during World War II. It is our mission to preserve their history for future generations. It is for us, those who came after the men you will read about and see, to cherise their memory and never forget the sacrifices they made so that we can enjoy the freedoms that we have today. Even more so, given the current economic and political climate, we need to remember what it was that made them the "greatest generation".
Before you progress on into the pages of the 445th's website, I would like to take a minute of your time with a request for assistance. For the past twenty years my wife Deborah (or Deb as she like to be called) and I have borne the full costs of supporting this website, doing the research, and purchasing materials to include in not only the website, but to enhance the Personal Military Biographies that we do for the veterans and families of 445th members.
Unless you have experience in website creation and hosting, most of you aren't aware of the costs that goes along with maintaining a website from year to year. I did a lot of research to find a good hosting company at a very reasonable price that would have the resources to host what I hope will become the model for a World War 2 aviation website. As I want to present a lot of pictures, bandwidth (how much website traffic would be allowed) and disk storage space (pictures eat up a lot of space) became primary factors. The Canadian firm called Netfirms had a package deal that was too good to pass up.
To host the website for 2 years is $214.80 and to register the domain name "445BG.org" is $35 per year. To develop the website, I purchased Incomedia's WebSite X5 at a cost of about $150. To store the hundreds of pictures, files, maps, and videos we've had to purchase additional disk storage equipment for my main computer system. Because of the size of some of the tables Deb and I are working with, our main computer system was upgraded to a custom built 4.2 GHz 8-core I-7 processor, 64 Gigabytes of RAM and 8.5 Terabytes of disk storage space. To use the additional Random Access Memory (RAM) in the system, the Operating System was upgraded to Windows 10 Professional (64-bit) ($239.00) and use Microsoft 365 to handle tables up to 4,795 rows by 300 columns.
There are other fees that we pay to get information and to provide services to our patrons. I keep a membership with Footnote.com to research biographical data on 445th members as well as having access to all of the Missing Air Crew Reports (MACRs) and photos that were digitized out of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, MD. That's $59.95 a year. All of the proceeds go back into an account we use only for the 445th Website and research services. We have also purchased 54 reels of microfilm records from the Air Force Historical Research Agency (AFHRA) located at Maxwell AFB, AL at $30/reel ($1,620).
Donations can be made by check, money order, and PayPal (which will handle secure credit card donations). If you would like to send your donations directly to me, please contact me at my 445th email account. Thank you very much for your time in reading this. Please continue on and learn about the 445th Bomb Group.
Thank you...