Louis H. Windsor.
Navigator · Hughes Crew · 330th Squadron
The man.
Louis Windsor served as navigator for the crew, flying all 35 missions and maintaining the detailed debriefing notes that documented each one — target, takeoff time, forming altitude, fuel load, course, weather, flak description, bombing accuracy, and crew morale. Those notes, covering the full arc of the crew's combat tour, became an invaluable record of what the missions actually looked like from inside the aircraft.
He appears in the crew photo taken March 24, 1945, seated in the bottom row, two weeks before the tour ended.
On April 8, 1945 — the crew's final mission — it fell to Windsor to send a cablegram to Lois Scott from the control tower. The message was simple: "All was well." At that moment, Hendershot was still in the bombardier's compartment recovering Pete Scott's remains, a task that had waited nearly five months since Hamburg. Windsor handled the harder task of being the first to reach her.
Away from operations, he was good company, if occasionally a hazard. He once dropped a couple of flares into the pot-bellied stove in their Nissen hut — a detail Hughes apparently felt worth preserving for posterity, along with a note warning readers not to confuse Windsor with engineer Conway Thorstensen. At some point during the war, Windsor joined Hughes and Thorstensen for a visit to Le Bourget in Paris, captured in a photograph included in the Memoir of Walter F. Hughes.
Service record.
Missions flown.
The missions below are those we have been able to document for this airman, drawn from flight logs, mission records, and archival sources. It is not necessarily a complete account of every mission flown; gaps may reflect missing documentation, transferred assignments, or records lost to time.