Capers Andrews Holmes, Jr. was born in Culloden, Georgia. During the Great Depression [Annotator's Note: The Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1945], his mother began a vegetable garden with which he helped her. Due to his hometown size and his family's self-sufficiency, Holmes did not notice how the Great Depression affected his life. Holmes' father was involved in many diverse jobs. He owned a cotton warehouse, he was involved in gardening, and he worked at a bank with his brother. In his teenage years, Holmes worked at the family's cotton warehouse and at a filling station given to him by his father for a summer. Before World War 2 started, Holmes completed school at the University of Georgia [Annotator's Note: in Athens, Georgia] and worked in the university's Alumni Office, editing the monthly alumni magazine. He had an ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] commission in the horse cavalry. In March 1941 he was ordered to active duty in the Air Corps. He was sent to training at Fort Benning, Georgia for a little over a year. After training as a pilot, Holmes was reassigned to Navigation School in a small town just outside of San Antonio, Texas. Holmes entered the service at the rank of lieutenant thanks to his ROTC commission, but by the time he graduated navigation school he was a captain. This created a problem because typically navigators were second lieutenants. After training navigators in the United States for a year, the Air Force assigned Holmes to a regular unit when the 467th Bomb Group [Annotator's Note: 467th Bombardment Group], 8th Air Force was being formed. The Air Force designated him the "group navigator." Holmes went to training at Wendover, Utah [Annotator's Note: at Wendover Air Force Base, now Wendover Airport, in Wendover, Utah]. The base sat on the border [Annotator's Note: the Western border with Nevada], which allowed soldiers to cross state lines to buy whiskey, as it was not sold in Utah. The terrain was bad for training and they lost several crews in crashes due to the mountains and the weather.

Capers Andrews Holmes, Jr. was assigned to the 467th Bomb Group [Annotator's Note: 467th Bombardment Group], 8th Air Force. Before deployment, his unit underwent inspection in Herington, Kansas [Annotator's Note: Herington Army Airfield in Herington, Kansas]. They left from Palm Beach, Florida and made stops at Trinidad [Annotator's Note: Trinidad and Tobago], Belém [Annotator's Note: Belém, Brazil] and Fortaleza, Brazil, across the Atlantic to Dakar, Senegal, and Marrakech, Morocco during their journey to Wales [Annotator's Note: Wales, England]. The B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] they were flying could only hold enough fuel for about eight to ten hours of flight. Upon arriving, they had an additional month of training before they could begin operations. Their base was at Rackheath [Annotator's Note: Royal Air Force Rackheath in Rackheath, England], near the larger city of Norwich [Annotator's Note: Norwich, England]. His group always claimed that their base was positioned closest to the Germans. The American navigators had to use the British systems in place to create their navigation plans. His group began operations in April 1944 and continued to do so until May 1945. His responsibility as group navigator was training and getting all the individual navigators operational. The organization consisted of four squadrons, there was a squadron navigator in charge of each unit. There were 20 crews to each squadron, and the group navigator was the overseer of every navigator. The American and British systems of navigation were vastly different. It was hard to do their job of mapping routes until the ground forces began pushing the enemy back, allowing for more forward radar to be established and utilized. Despite the fears of the crews, the first mission was easy. The first combat mission for the 467th was on 2 April 1944. Twelve planes went out on that mission and the group commander, determined to fly the first mission himself, also sent Holmes. The group commander, Albert J. Shower [Annotator's Note: US Army Air Forces Colonel Albert J. Shower], graduated from West Point [Annotator's Note: United States Military Academy in West Point, New York] and brought with him a very rigorous and strict approach to commanding the group. Holmes believes that in the long run, Shower's demanding style led to a great deal of his men returning home safely from the war. That first mission was to Bourges, Frances. The mission was a success with no casualties suffered. The 467th was the next-to-last B-24 group assigned to Europe and flew 285 missions from April 1944 until May 1945. The weather was a limiting factor in how often they could operate. Their equipment was grounded for a week during the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] due to inclement weather. His first mission was a milk run [Annotator's Note: slang term used by American airmen to describe an easy combat mission], due to never seeing an enemy fighter and the absence of flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire]. The 467th targeted Bourges because it had an airport. Their main goal was to decommission the runway in the hopes of knocking out the German planes there. Later on, when the offensive switched to targets inside of Germany they attacked railroads, factories, ammunition depots, and most importantly enemy airfields and oil refineries. By bombing the runways, they stopped enemy air operations. Destroying the refineries crippled Germany's ability to refuel, as they could not import fuel from many places.

Capers Andrews Holmes, Jr. experienced enemy fire returning from a bombing mission to Hamm, Germany on 22 April 1944. It was the first, and only, mission that they [Annotator's Note: 467th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force] flew in the late afternoon. The German fighters followed them back to their base [Annotator's Note: Royal Air Force Rackheath, Rackheath, England] before they began firing. Holmes was a navigator, so he left his position from the nose of the B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber]. He knew that they had arrived back to the base but did not know why they continued to circle it. The runway lights were turned off until the German fighters left. The Germans killed one person during this attack. On 16 November 1944, Holmes' plane suffered an engine failure during take-off. A heavy sheet of fog hid their base from view, and they were forced to fly to Woodbridge, England [Annotator's Note: Royal Air Force Woodbridge] for an emergency landing. Woodbridge equipped jets along the side of its runway and when they were ignited the heat pushed the fog up and allowed for better visibility for planes coming in for a landing [Annotator's Note: Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation, FIDO]. On 1 January 1945 the 467th bombed Koblenz, Germany. When bombing a target, the planes wanted the wind to be going the same way they were traveling. This allowed them to reach and pass their objective faster. On the mission to Koblenz the forecast told them the wind was going in the opposite direction than it actually was. They were flying directly into a 130 mile per hour wind, and their B-24 did not travel much faster than that. This resulted in the bomber slowly crawling through the wind toward the target, making them an easy object for antiaircraft fire. Holmes and his group were not able to fly many missions around this time due to the weather. Despite the disastrous weather conditions, they only lost one plane on that mission. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Holmes if his group ever ran support missions for ground troops.] The 467th tried to destroy the Remagen Bridge [Annotator's Note: the Ludendorff Bridge across the Rhine River in Remagen, Germany], only for the ground forces to find it intact and later use it to cross the Rhine River. Bridges were a very hard target to hit on account of their size and their surprising durability. Despite this, the bomb groups hit numerous bridges making an impact for the ground forces. The Air Force allowed its soldiers to go home after flying a set number of missions: first 25, then 30, and finally 35. Due to Holmes' rank as Captain, he flew more sporadically and did not reach 35 missions. In his missions, Holmes never experienced any significant damage from enemy fire and only a few of his crew members were ever injured. Holmes' job as group navigator was mainly in training new people coming in and briefing every mission that the 467th participated in. He got the routes, marked it out, and made up the maps for the crews so they knew where they were going. The biggest mishap his crews had was an inadvertent crash landing caused by a flat tire during landing.

To Capers Andrews Holmes, Jr., Colonel Shower [Annotator's Note: US Army Air Forces Colonel Albert J. Shower] as an unapologetic West Point [Annotator's Note: United States Military Academy, West Point New York] graduate. He was a very strict disciplinarian, enforcing things such as requiring a dress shirt and tie to attend evening meals. Shower received a great deal of complaints from his soldiers, but Holmes attests that his leadership style paid off. The 467th Bomb Group [Annotator's Note: 467th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force] had the lowest casualty rate out of any of the groups that they flew with. He was tough but fair. Shower enforced full uniform parades and inspections on Saturday mornings. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Holmes about his final mission. The video cuts to Holmes looking through personal notes.] Holmes' 27th and final mission was to Plauen, Germany on 5 April 1945. The mission was a milk run [Annotator's Note: slang term used by American airmen to describe an easy combat mission] and they lost no planes. The war was coming to an end around this time, and the missions were getting increasingly less memorable and dangerous. After the military, Holmes worked for Pan American Airways filling out tickets for people taking trips. He did not enjoy it and quit after six months. He returned to his alma mater, the University of Georgia [Annotator's Note: in Athens, Georgia], for his master's degree. Halfway through his return to college he decided what he really wanted to do was return to the Air Force. He applied and was accepted. He was given a regular commission and finished his master's degree in 1948. His first assignment was to the Pentagon in Washington [Annotator's Note: Washington D.C.] where he reviewed how proposed legislation would affect the Air Force. The Air Force sent him to Maxwell Field [Annotator's Note: now Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama] to help in the planning for the future Air Force Academy [Annotator's Note: United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado]. After four years, the Air Force moved Holmes to Wiesbaden, Germany. From there, Holmes visited air bases in England, France, Holland, Greece, French Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. When his tour in Germany was up, Holmes spent four more years at the Pentagon, and then was transferred to Paris, France to work at SHAPE [Annotator's Note: Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe]. Holmes was strictly an office worker there but found it an acceptable arrangement due to being paid to live in Paris. After this stint in Paris, he was sent back to the Pentagon to arrange the construction of military bases in the Pacific. He retired from the military in 1970. He returned to Montgomery [Annotator's Note: Montgomery, Alabama] to be with his extended family.

The only time Capers Andrews Holmes, Jr.'s base was attacked was when a group of German fighters followed Holmes' bomb group [Annotator's Note: 467th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force] back to their airfield after a mission. When they first arrived in England [Annotator's Note: Royal Air Force Rackheath in Rackheath, England], there were a few instances of them being told to head for cover due to a possible attack, but nothing ever transpired. By the time that Holmes was in England the Germans were using buzzbombs [Annotator's Note: V-1 pulse jet flying bomb, German name: Vengeance Weapon 1; Allied names: buzz bomb, doodlebug] and those posed a threat to their base near Norwich [Annotator's Note: Norwich, England], about 130 miles north of London [Annotator's Note: London, England]. One time while on leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] in London, Holmes witnessed a buzzbomb hit the city. The surrounding Londoners did not even bother to look at the explosion or flinch at the sound due to how much they were accustomed to the constant bombings. While at Rackheath, Holmes attended a USO [Annotator's Note: United Services Organization, Inc.] show, where a cast of six members put on a play in the dining room of the base. Holmes most enjoyed the shows that the London Theater put on during the war. The war gave Holmes a better appreciation for other people and other countries. Particularly the way that the British carried on despite five years of war. He had admired their resolve. The war gave him a greater perspective on other people because until that point he had lived a comfortable and insulated life. He notes that everyone worked together, one-for-all and all-for-one. Holmes does not know if we are any better now than we were in the past. He thinks that places such as The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] are vital, and he says that it is a great institution that does an excellent job of educating people.